Every Team's Most Interesting Player: Houston Astros, Yuli Gurriel

This is the 11th 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 Yuli Gurriel of the Houston Astros.

35-year-old hitters are rarely “interesting” for fantasy purposes, but Gurriel is extremely atypical. Despite his advanced age, he is entering just his fifth MLB season, and even more strangely, is coming off a career-best campaign in which he slashed .298/.343/.541 with 31 home runs. Gurriel is currently going at No. 114 overall, 15th among first basemen, and 16th among third basemen.

While Gurriel’s power was exceptional, that was not what anyone who drafted him expected. The key to Gurriel’s value is batting average; in a game where power has become the end-all, be-all, batting average and stolen bases are becoming scarce. Players who can deliver in those categories consistently should see a boost, and Gurriel has hit better than .290 for three straight seasons. He doesn’t walk much, but he also strikes out rarely, and made contact 86.3% of the time last season.  Gurriel, despite being “old,” is one of the purest hitters in the game. And he’s being drafted as such, but the fantasy community clearly remains skeptical of his leap from 31 combined home runs in 2017 and 2018, to 31 homers last season alone. So can he repeat the power fireworks?

Gurriel was not alone in hitting a ton of dongs. Home runs were up across the sport last season, leading to accusations that the league juiced the balls to boost power numbers. So there’s that. Gurriel also plays in Minute Maid Park, a known hitter’s haven, and he bats in the middle of one of MLB’s best lineups. Gurriel experienced an eight-point jump in his hard contact rate, elevating to 38.6%. He made either medium or hard contact 82.8% of the time last year, with a 15.6% home run to fly ball mark. While that is certainly high for Gurriel, it’s not a freakish number and it’s one that could be sustained with his consistently hard contact.

There are cons. Gurriel did not get the barrel of the bat on the ball very often, an indicator that maybe 30+ home runs is too aggressive an expectation. He averaged 89.1 mph exit velocity last year, a number that’s strong, but only ranked 127th among hitters with at least 150 batted ball events. These don’t mean I think Gurriel is due to fall off, just that those home runs he hit last season could wind up doubles in 2020.

And then there’s the cheating scandal. While I am not putting a ton of stock in slashing projections for Astros hitters, it’s not unreasonable to think some of Gurriel’s success was inflated by knowing what pitches were coming.

Right now, his ADP seems like it accurately weighs the risk of power regression. At this valuation, Gurriel will be a value to your fantasy team because of the batting average and RBI opportunity he’ll see hitting in the middle of Houston’s stacked lineup. We’re probably looking at a bit of a letdown for homers, with Gurriel settling in the low-to-mid 20s. Come draft time, hope your league mates are overestimating the impact of the cheating controversy, and Gurriel could become a draft day steal.