Fantasy Baseball Draft Targets: Aaron Judge, Aaron Nola, Carlos Correa (2024)

Even though numbers and statistics can tell a clear story about a player, we know that narratives and subjective value play a major role in how we approach draft season. For example, we can argue that a player had a “down year” in 2023 and that it suggests the beginning of a downturn.

Or we can highlight that same player, compare the numbers to the career averages, and look for a return back to the mean.

This is how we identify positive regression and bounce-back candidates.

We aren’t picky about how or why those numbers dipped, either. Sometimes, underlying injuries played a role. Other times, we can’t exactly find the cause, but we have the history that suggests it was an outlier.

All we care about is the rebound.

Fantasy Baseball Bounce-Back Candidates to Draft

Aaron Judge (OF – NYY)

If we’re looking at qualified hitters from 2023, then Aaron Judge’s name doesn’t appear on most leaderboards. Therein lies the heart of the question around Judge: Will he remain healthy throughout the season? He played at least 148 games in both 2021 and 2022 and finished fourth and first in the MVP race, respectively. Last season, he appeared in just 106 games, which was more aligned with the 2018 and 2019 campaigns of 112 and 102 games, respectively.

The good news for fantasy managers is that, when Judge is in the lineup, he continues to deliver to an elite level. Among all players with at least 200 plate appearances, Judge ranked first in hard-hit percentage and home run rate. He actually finished in the top 10 for total home runs despite trailing everyone else in that category by at least 130 plate appearances — or approximately 30 games.

Suffice it to say that the same caveat is placed on Judge this year as has been used in the past. If he can stay healthy, he is in line for another big — and, in this case, bounce-back — year. But he also lands on this list because he has still shown the potential to outperform his numbers even if he does miss time yet again.

Aaron Nola (SP – PHI)

Aaron Nola has quietly become one of the most reliable pitchers in the league in terms of staying on the field. He made exactly 32 starts in each of the last three seasons, 12 starts during the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign and then 33 and 34 starts in 2018 and 2019, respectively. He’s a rare example of stability and avoiding injury at a position where that is no easy task.

In terms of production, however, “stability” is not the word for Nola. He has had alternating years of high and low ERAs since 2020, but last season’s numbers were concerning throughout. Nola produced his worst strikeout rate since his rookie season in 2015.

Why, then, should we expect a positive regression? Largely because there were no underlying reasons why he should have struggled as he did. His average fastball velocity was the same in 2023 in 2022, and his actual ERA was significantly higher than his xERA and xFIP. There’s simply room to improve now, and his historical trends have shown that he can make such adjustments. We even saw that in his strikeout rate taking a nice step forward in the second half of last year.

Carlos Correa (SS – MIN)

One of the key elements of this article is to find players whose 2023 numbers appear to be outliers compared to their season averages. Enter Carlos Correa. Correa was eventually diagnosed with an injury that ended his season early, and the ailment likely played a role in his decreased output.

So let’s take a look at that output.

Correa’s 2021 and 2022 numbers are as follows, taken from FanGraphs:

2021: .279 batting average, 26 home runs, .366 on-base percentage, .364 wOBA, 36.5 hard-hit percentage

2022: .291 batting average, 22 home runs, .366 on-base percentage, .362 wOBA, 36.0 hard-hit percentage

And now let’s look at 2023:

.230 batting average, 18 home runs, .312 on-base percentage, .309 wOBA, 36.5 hard-hit percentage

We’re not exactly splitting atoms here to conclude that everything about Correa’s 2023 campaign was a massive disappointment from what we’ve come to expect, but there was one number that stayed almost identical for three consecutive years. That is hard-hit percentage. Correa was still driving the ball just as well as he had been in the past, but the results weren’t there. If he can keep making hard contact and stay healthy, 2024 will be a bounce-back year for the Twins’ shortstop.

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Mario Mergola is a featured writer at FantasyPros and BettingPros and the creator and content editor of Sporfolio. For more from Mario, check out his archive and follow him @MarioMergola.