Fantasy baseball trade value rankings: Hitters to buy, pitchers to sell as we enter June

We’re officially into the third month of the 2023 MLB season, which means “it’s still early!” is rapidly becoming a less compelling excuse for fantasy managers trying to decide whether to hold onto struggling stars or cut bait. It’s also the point at which you decide whether you’re in it to win it this year, and what you might need to make that happen.

Which is where our weekly trade value rankings come in. Not only do we rank the top 200 players for fantasy baseball (5x5 roto), but we also break down who’s rising, who’s falling and who we recommend targeting on the trade market.

Buy

• Schwarber has put up one of the most outrageously weird statlines you’ll ever see so far this year: a .163/.318/.395 slash with 40 walks, 68 strikeouts and just 31 total hits — 18 of which have gone for extra bases (including 31 homers). That’s certainly not what fantasy owners were hoping when they drafted him in the spring. The really weird thing, though, is that Schwarber’s quality of contact is about the same as it was last year when he hit .218 with an NL-leading 46 homers.

The main difference? The slugger is running a BABIP of .165, more than 50 points lower than the lowest number of his career. That’s sure to normalize over the course of the season, and when it does, homers should follow — and the batting average should get at least back up over the Mendoza Line. Schwarber’s gotten even more pull-happy than normal, possibly to try and take advantage of the death of the infield shift, and he likely won’t get back to the .250ish number he was at earlier in his career. But there’s currently a 33-point gap between his wOBA and xwOBA, and that’s a gap you should try and take advantage of on the trade market.

• Unlike Schwarber, Harris’ contact profile has backslid badly from his breakout 2022 campaign. Still, the dynamic outfielder hasn’t been this bad, and even if he doesn’t reach last year’s heights again, he’s still a worthy buy-low candidate. He too has been bitten by the BABIP gods, with a .215 mark over 100 points below any number he’s ever had between the Minors and the Majors — and one that’s goofy low for a guy as fast as Harris is.

His K rate is down and his walk rate is up, signaling that his plate skills haven’t deteriorated, and the exit velocity numbers are about the same as last season. He’s hitting too many lazy fly balls right now, but he’s also running a 6.9% HR/FB rate that’s also due for some positive regression. Statcast has Harris as one of the unluckiest hitters in baseball by xwOBA-wOBA, and that luck should turn soon.

Sell

• Not all Atlanta Braves youngsters have been so snake-bitten, though. By contrast, rookie starter Bryce Elder has been blessed by the baseball gods, with an expected ERA of 4.15 that makes his actual mark of 1.92 look like a massive outlier. Of course, these sorts of metrics do tend to underrated sinkerballers like Elder — they rely on their defense to turn grounders into outs, which is more prone to noise and less in a pitcher’s control than strikeouts — but there are still reasons to try and shop Elder around to see if you can get a haul from someone in your league.

For starters: Elder’s strand rate is 87.4% — second-highest in baseball, way above league average and sure to come down over the rest of the season. The loud contact that Elder has been giving up (ninth-percentile hard-hit rate) has been mostly coming with no one on base; with ducks on the pond, his OPS allowed drops all the way to .478. There’s nothing to suggest that this sort of sequencing is in a pitcher’s control, and once it regresses, runs should follow. If you can swap him for, say, Dylan Cease or Yu Darvish (or any other underperforming ace with strikeout upside), I’d do it.

• Kodai Senga is coming off of arguably the best start of his young MLB career, spinning seven innings of one-hit ball while striking out nine in a win over the Philadelphia Phillies this week. So why am I telling you to sell?

For starters, only do so if you can get a commensurate return — don’t sell him for a bag of balls. But if you can get an ace or an impact bat, consider pulling the trigger, because Senga will likely be maddening to own for the rest of the year. Really, this is less about him than it is about any pitcher who’s so reliant on a splitter, a pitch notorious for coming and going on a start-to-start basis. Senga had his famed “ghost fork” working against the Phils, generating a whopping 12 swings and misses, but when he doesn’t have the feel for it, things get ugly in a hurry. (To whit: five runs on eight hits in five innings against the Cincinnati Reds, three runs on six hits and five walks in five innings against the Chicago Cubs.) The righty’s fastball, cutter and slider haven’t performed particularly well this year, and that makes him as boom-or-bust an option as there is in the league. Value him accordingly.

Fantasy baseball trade value rankings: Week 10