Every Team's Most Interesting Player: Cincinnati Reds, Jesse Winker

This is the seventh 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 Jesse Winker of the Cincinnati Reds.

Winker was an extremely trendy sleeper pick last season, billed as a junior Joey Votto, and slotted to bat either leadoff or second in the Reds lineup. Things didn’t go quite as planned; Winker played in just 113 games, slashing .269/.357/.473 with 16 home runs and 38 RBI. Injuries hurt Winker in 2019, but even before he was plagued, Winker was hitting for very little power and was not showcasing the on-base skills that vaulted him up rankings.

The excitement stemmed from Winker’s 89 games in 2018, in which he hit .299 with a .405 OBP and seven home runs. He’d reached base at a .375 clip in 2017 for Cincinnati across 47 games, and throughout his minor league career had consistently gotten on base. As we all know by now, getting on base is one of the most desirable skills a player can have, especially for fantasy owners. You can’t score runs or steal bases when you don’t get on base, so even without elite power, someone getting on at the rate Winker was showing is worth owning. But, there was reason to be excited about his power potential too. He hit 16 home runs in Single-A in 2013, 13 in High-A in just 53 games, and 13 in Double-A. He posted a strong 23.3% home run to fly ball rate that was counteracted unfortunately by a measly 30% fly ball rate. But, as a young player, we buy on the elite skills and hope the rest of his game fills out and forms an everyday plug-and-play.

In 2019, that didn’t happen. Winker’s walk rate dipped below 10%. His ground ball rate rose to nearly 50%, and his fly ball rate plummeted all the way down to 24.9%, which sucks. That’s terrible and rendered him almost unplayable for stretches of time. Winker was more aggressive at the plate, but mostly on pitches inside the strike zone which we’d want. Ultimately, it appears Winker just flat out had a bad season and then started getting hurt which decreased his opportunity to right the ship.

The good news is that Winker will enter 2020 as a 25-year-old, with a track record of elite on-base skills dating back to 2012. While the power may not ever reach the peak levels of Votto at his peak, Winker has the potential to be a Votto clone in terms of reaching base at close to a .400 clip.

He’s projected to bat sixth in an improved lineup that will have Mike Moustakas in it, and a full season of Aristides Aquino, which should raise his RBI total dramatically. Or, free agent acquisition Shogo Akiyama could flop, and Winker could find himself hitting leadoff and flirting with 100+ runs. There are multiple paths to success for Winker, who has been discarded entirely by the fantasy community based on his No. 305 overall ADP.