Fantasy Baseball Hitter Targets: Spencer Torkelson and others hunting the first pitch

We’ve reached the point in the MLB season where certain stats begin to stabilize. When stats stabilize, that doesn’t mean they will remain there for the rest of the season, but it does mean that they become a little “stickier” and more meaningful than if we were only using 10 or 20 games as a sample size.

Unfortunately, some of my favorite stats to use to identify hitters to target (Process+, line drive rate, barrel rate, etc.) have not yet stabilized for the majority of the league, so it’s just a bit too early to turn our attention to those. However, strikeout rate for hitters stabilizes after 60 plate appearances, and walk rate stabilizes after 120 plate appearances, so the process-oriented stats are now in a place where we can start to dig in to see which changes may be most meaningful for fantasy baseball.

Last week, I created a custom leaderboard of the process stats that I really like to try to find hitters who were not chasing bad pitches and were making more contact in the zone than many other hitters. Today, we’re going to look at hitters who are being more aggressive in their approach than last year. Since process stats have started to stabilize, that means swing decisions and hitter attack plans are becoming “sticky,” and a clear sign of a conscious change.

In this article, we’re going to look at hitters who are swinging at the first pitch far more often than they did last year. The hope is to find hitters who are “hunting” their pitch and trying to do damage on a grooved fastball or a hanging breaking ball, etc. To try and identify who is not just being aggressive but being selectively aggressive, I also added in Pitcher List’s Strikezone Judgment score which measures “the ‘correctness’ of a hitter’s swings and takes, using the likelihood of a pitch being a called strike (for swings) or a ball/HBP (for takes).” This means we’ll be trying to find hitters who are being aggressive on the first pitch and ALSO hitters who are making the right calls in terms of when to swing and when not to. That should lead us to hitters who are showcasing a new approach that is helping them make the most meaningful contact possible.

Let’s see how we did.

Fantasy Baseball Hitter Targets

For Strikezone Judgment, it’s graded on the “Plus” scale, where 100 is league average with a standard deviation of 15.

Rowdy Tellez has come up on a bunch of my hitting searches this season, and, on some level, it’s easy to see why. He has a 15.4% barrel rate and 91.6 mph average exit velocity. He’s been more aggressive than he’s ever been with a 32.4% chase rate and nearly 60% swing rate overall. However, his zone contact rate has plummeted to 78%, and his swinging strike rate is up to 14.5%. When you also consider that his pull rate is down and his Strikezone Judgment score is so poor, it seems to indicate that he’s being aggressive on pitches that aren’t ones he can drive. We love the hard contact, but unless he changes his approach and dials back the aggression a bit, or starts making better swing decisions, that hard contact is going to be meaningless for fantasy.

What should stand out here is Jackson Chourio’s strikezone judgement score of 84, which is the third-lowest of anybody on this list. He’s not striking out a lot, and he has a 92% zone contact rate on the year, but he’s chasing far too much with a 43.4% chase rate, which has led to a 12.3% swinging strike rate. Players who can make an elite amount of contact tend to have poor strikezone judgment scores (like Corbin Carroll and Steven Kwan on the next list) because they can make contact on pitches that would be called a ball. That kind of approach might work for players like Carroll and Kwan, who are either not power hitters (Kwan) or have a really strong idea of the pitches they can drive (Carroll). Right now, it seems like Chourio, who is just 21 years old, is still learning which pitches to go after, and that just because he CAN hit something doesn’t mean he SHOULD swing at it.

Chourio’s teammate Joey Ortiz has the worst strikezone judgment score of anybody on this list. He, like Kwan and Carroll, can make contact on so many pitches that he knows he can chase outside of the zone a bit. The issue is that Ortiz doesn’t seem to have as much of a sense of what he SHOULD be attacking. He’s chasing out of the zone almost 7% more, still making contact at an 86% clip, but making so much soft contact. He has an average exit velocity of 83.4 mph and just a 32% hard hit rate. Part of that could be that he’s putting the ball in the air too often, but the early swing rates for Ortiz don’t appear to be working right now.

Christopher Morel is an interesting case. He’s swinging at the first pitch way more often in 2025 and has a good strikezone judgment score, but his zone contact rate is only up 1.1%. So he’s swinging more often in the zone and swinging at good pitches in the zone, which is likely why he has a 20.8% barrel rate, 90.4 mph average exit velocity, and .234 average (.242 xBA). However, he also still has a 20.3% swinging strike rate and is chasing out of the zone more than he ever has. What this tells me is that, even when Morel is making good swing decisions, he’s still going to swing and miss a lot, and it’s hard for him to toggle between being more aggressive in the zone but not being more aggressive overall. When you pair that with the natural swing and miss he seems to have even on pitches inside the zone, you’re likely to always see his average sit around .240 or below. Still, that could come with decent power if his pulled fly ball approach starts to translate in the warm months in Steinbrenner Field.

Ceddanne Rafaela is in a similar situation. The former top prospect is doing some good things this year. He has lowered his strikeout rate to 18.5% and cut his chase rate by 4%. He’s being more aggressive in the zone and has league-average strikezone judgement, which has led to an impressive 12.5% barrel rate and 90.3 mph average exit velocity. The issue is that he’s still swinging and missing 16.4% of the time, and his zone contact rate is just 80.6% despite the good swing decisions. His swing may simply be too long to make consistent contact, but it’s nice to see that he’s making strides in his process. He’s only 24 years old, so there is time for him to work to shorten the swing and be more contact-focused, but without that, is he Christopher Morel with less power but much better speed and defense?

Seeing Spencer Torkelson and Michael Busch on here shouldn’t be much of a surprise given how well the two first basemen are playing. Torkelson is more interesting because so much of his profile remains the same as last year. His zone swing rate and swing rate are actually down from last year, and his contact rate is up just 0.4%; yet, he’s swinging at the first pitch 8.6% more than last year. That could mean Torkelson is being more aggressive on the first pitch but more passive as he gets deeper into the count, which is not a bad combination. His pull rates and flyball rates are basically identical to last year, so his 17% barrel rate and 91.6 mph average exit velocity might just be the result of a more mature and selectively aggressive approach in the strike zone.

Busch also doesn’t have a ton of difference in his profile. He’s swinging only 0.6% more this year and chasing slightly less. However, he’s being pitched in the zone over 3% more often this year, which means pitchers are attacking him in the zone far more often and might be why his first pitch swing rate has gone up so high. His SwStr% is almost the same as last year, and his contact rate is only up 1%, so we’re not seeing a drastically different hitter, but he’s pulling and lifting the ball slightly more and taking advantage of the pitchers’ aggression. It will be interesting to see what happens if pitchers throw him in the zone less as the year goes on.

Lourdes Gurriel Jr. may be an intriguing buy-low or waiver wire candidate on this list. He’s currently sporting the lowest strikeout rate of his career and a 9.5% barrel rate that’s his highest since 2021. He is being far more aggressive overall, with a 3.2% increase in swing rate and way more aggressive in the zone. He’s also expanding the zone more than he did last year, but his contact on pitches outside of the zone remains good. His 84% contact rate overall is solid, as is his 8.6% SwStr%, so there’s a lot to like here. The only issue may be that he has a 53.4% fly ball rate, which is over 12% more than last year, but comes with an alarmingly high 13% infield fly ball rate. If Gurriel can keep the same approach but focus more on line drives and less on getting under the ball, we might see a nice run of production here.

More Fantasy Baseball Hitter Targets

Pete Alonso, Paul Goldschmidt, Fernando Tatis Jr., and Wilyer Abreu are all off to solid starts to the season, so it makes some sense that they all are being more aggressive on the first pitch and, in the case of Alonso and Abreu, posting above-average strikezone judgment scores. Alonso and Tatis have both been totally locked in to start the season, and Abreu is sporting a 15.4% walk rate and 22% strikeout rate with a 14% barrel rate thanks to his good eye and aggressive approach in the zone. All of these guys feel like their hot starts are very much earned.

More than a handful of people are concerned about Austin Wells since he’s slashing .212/.264/.469 in 33 games to start the season with just a 6.4% walk rate, which is down from 11.4% last year. While that drop in walk rate is not ideal, there doesn’t seem to be anything concerning attached to it. Yes, Wells is swinging outside of the zone more this year, but he’s also being pitched in the zone less often than last year and is making a lot of contact outside of the zone and making more contact overall. His zone contact rate, contact rate, and swinging strike rate are all better than last year. Does he maybe need to lay off more pitches outside of the zone? Sure, but he’s making good swing decisions in the zone and has a 13.2% barrel rate and 90.7 mph average exit velocity. Perhaps he has gone too far in his desire to lift the ball, with a 13% increase in fly ball rate that is helping to power but hurting his average. At the end of the day, there are some slight modifications that he needs to make, but there are no major red flags here.

Bo Naylor is another catcher with mediocre surface-level results who is doing some interesting things under the hood. For starters, Naylor has cut his strikeout rate to 20% and increased his walk rate to 12.1% while posting a career-high 10.4% barrel rate and 90.8 mph average exit velocity. Wait, how is somebody who’s doing that hitting only .200? Much like Wells, Naylor has perhaps leaned into the launch angle a bit too much, with a 10% increase in fly ball rate that has come with a 13.5% infield fly ball rate. He’s swinging more overall, and that includes being more aggressive both inside and outside of the strike zone. His zone swing decisions are good, and his 87% zone contact is solid, so this feels a bit like a guy who needs to be just a touch less aggressive outside of the zone and perhaps try to be a bit more line drive-focused, but I don’t think we’re far away from a Bo Naylor hot streak here.

On the flip side, both Vinnie Pasquantino and Ryan McMahon are not off to great starts, and their approach could have something to do with it. Pasquantino is still making elite zone contact, but his overall contact rate has dropped significantly, and much of that has to do with his contact outside of the zone dropping over 13%. He’s being more aggressive outside of the zone, but actually LESS aggressive in the zone. As you can see from his Strikezone Judgment score above, his decisions in the zone are well below the league average. His swinging strike rate is up almost 4%, and even though it’s still better than league average, you’re seeing a hitter who is not comfortable. He’s pulling and lifting the ball more than he ever has before, and his fly ball rate is up 11%. This just seems like a hitter who is lost at the plate a bit right now, swinging at pitches he shouldn’t be and taking pitches that he should be unloading on. It can be fixed, but he needs to alter his approach fast.

The situation with Ryan McMahon is less cut and dry. He’s swinging outside of the zone less and swinging inside of the zone at about the same rate as before. As you can see from the chart above, his decisions in the strike zone are good ones, and his zone contact is right at his career average, but he’s still swinging and missing more overall, and his contact rate is down. Much like Pasquantino, he’s pulling and lifting the ball more than he ever has, with a pull rate that’s 11% above his career average and a fly ball rate that’s 10% above his career mark. His bat speed is almost two mph faster than last year and his average exit velocity has jumped to 94.1 mph, so all of that should be stuff that we like to see; yet, he somehow is making 25% less contact outside of the strike zone despite swinging at pitches outside of the zone LESS OFTEN. It’s kind of hard for me to reconcile what’s happening here. At some point, you have to think the hits will start to fall.

Jorge Polanco is one of the true waiver wire gems of the 2025 fantasy baseball season so far. A lot of his success has to do with simply being healthy, but he’s also had a more aggressive approach, swinging more overall and way more inside the strike zone. His strikezone decisions have been among the best in the league, so hunting pitches early in the count has been good for him. His swinging strike rate is down nearly 2%, and he’s pulling the ball on the ground and on a line more often than before, which has led to a 17% barrel rate. No, he’s not going to hit .348 with a .707 slugging percentage the rest of the way, but the success we’re seeing is very legit.

I also like a lot of what Jake Meyers is doing, and I wish that the Astros hadn’t pulled him from the lineup when he slumped back in April, because I dropped a few of the shares I had of him. Meyers is back to playing every day in center field and producing for Houston. So far this season, he is chasing outside of the zone less often than last year, which has helped him improve his contact rate and cut his swinging strike rate. He’s not being more aggressive in the zone, but pitchers are challenging him inside the strike zone 7% more often, which is a massive increase. So Meyers is laying off bad pitches and being challenged more, and simply meeting the challenge. He’s also focusing on pulling and lifting the ball less, which has led to an all-fields groundball approach that is really helping his batting average. Considering you have Meyers on your team for his speed, we don’t care if he’s not producing power numbers. This new approach could allow him to hit .270, which would likely lead to 20 stolen bases while playing most days for the Astros. That’s a solid player in a lot of league types.