Every Team's Most Interesting Player: Atlanta Braves, Austin Riley

This is the second in a series of articles about the most interesting player for fantasy owners on each team heading into the 2020 season. We are going alphabetically, so today we’re going to talk about Austin Riley of the Atlanta Braves.

Riley arrived in the majors with a bang, hitting .356 with seven home runs, 20 RBI and 10 runs scored in 15 games in May.

His batting average plummeted in June, but he still cranked seven more homers, giving him 14 in his first 43 games. The rest of the season got ugly; Riley hit just .161 with two home runs in the second half, striking out 39 times and walking just six. He was the No. 33 prospect in baseball entering 2019 per Fangraphs, and was the No. 2 prospect in Atlanta’s organization. So are we thinking he’s a mammoth power breakout in 2020, or the free-swinging mess we saw for four months?

He’s unlikely to win any Silver Sluggers in his career, but the power of those first two months is very real. Fangraphs’ Prospect report rated him 70/70 in the power department, and that was evident as he blasted away in the early going. His lack of home runs as the season wore on was no indictment of his power potential; it was his lack of contact being exposed. Riley has hit well at every level of the minors, batting .315 at Double-A across 48 games, and hitting .293 with 15 bombs at Triple-A across 44 games before his call up to the big club.

Last season’s dreadful decline proved one thing; he was overwhelmed in his first exposure to major league pitching. Riley posted a 30.6 K% in his first 30 games of rookie ball before it dropped to 21.4% in his next 30 games. By the time he was in Triple-A in 2019, Riley was only whiffing 20% of the time. That skyrocketed last year, when he posted an obscene 36.4% strikeout rate and walked just 5.4% of the time. It’s a disgusting profile, but it’s also completely inconsistent with the player he’s been since 2015. We should expect Riley to make much more contact in 2020, and for him, that’s great. When Riley connects, he hits the ball very hard. Per Fangraphs, he made hard contact 42.5% of the time, and medium contact 34.1%. He also hit it in the air close to half the time, putting himself in prime position to contribute via the long ball.

Riley is currently an afterthought for fantasy owners, going 29th among 3B in between Wil Myers and Matt Carpenter. While he could easily be waiver fodder because of his inability to consistently get wood on the baseball, he has significantly greater upside than most of the players in his range due to his power potential. Riley also has the advantage of a rocket arm, which Atlanta will want at the hot corner defensively even if his batting average is in the toilet. Because of his arm, Riley should be allowed to work through his rough patches at the plate, and may wind up as a valuable – and most importantly, cheap – source of power and RBI in Atlanta’s dangerous lineup.