Every Team's Most Interesting Player: Baltimore Orioles, Trey Mancini

This is the third 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 Trey Mancini of the Baltimore Orioles.

The Orioles were one of the worst teams in baseball history last season, but that did not mean their roster carried no fantasy relevance. They had a few bright spots, and one of them was Mancini. He posted a .291/.364/.535 slash line, swatted 35 homers, scored 106 runs and amassed 97 RBI with an .899 OPS. Entering his age-28 season, is Mancini a late breakout?

The key to Mancini’s appeal will be duplicating the power. Based on his track record, it seems like his pop is legit, and he simply became a better hitter in 2019. He’d banged 24 dongs in each of the previous two seasons, before upping that total to 35 last year. He walked three percent more than the prior campaign, struck out three percent less, and raised his hard contact rate four percentage points. Equally important, his soft contact dropped all the way down to 15.7%. Simply put, Mancini either hits the ball hard, or really hard. Mancini finished 2019 with an average exit velocity of 90.3 mph (thanks, Baseball Savant), and a 31.9% fly ball rate. That’s a foundation he can build on for even more power, and there’s some evidence that his home run total could shoot up.

Aside from the 35 home runs, Mancini compiled 38 doubles and two triples, showing the potential to get into the 40-homer club, and proving another spike is probably more likely than reversion to the mid-20s. Some may point to the league-wide home run explosion and “juiced balls,” but Mancini’s 23.6% home run to fly ball ratio was, if anything, underwhelming. A high ground ball rate is partially to blame for the subpar home run to fly ball mark, but Mancini did progress toward rectifying that flaw in his game, dropping from 54.6% in 2018 to 45.9% in 2019. Mancini’s launch angle went up to 7.8 in 2019, from 5.4 the previous season. As long as Mancini keeps the ball elevated, he’s going to run into 30+ homer runs based on his natural power, and has the upside to crack 40.

Mancini is currently No. 103 off the board per Fantasypros, and No. 13 per ADP among first basemen. This is about right, but there’s a chance that he has a 2019 Josh Bell kind of season. At worst, he’s 30 home runs and a nice source of runs and RBI hitting in the meat of the Orioles’ order with no competition.