Every Team's Most Interesting Player: Oakland Athletics, Ramon Laureano

This is the 20th 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 Ramon Laureano of the Oakland Athletics.

Laureanou was a breakout player in 2019 to fans of the live version of baseball, earning the nickname “Laser” Ramon because of his absurd arm. Defense often has very little to do with fantasy, but it’s cool AF to see him throw so check these out.

Anyway, his defensive highlights can overshadow what was a massively useful fantasy player. He hit .288, smashed 24 home runs and stole 13 bags in 123 games. Laureano’s batting average was probably not a fluke. He had some valleys in his minor league history, but he was a mostly strong hitter in his career prior to hitting the bigs, and then hit .288 in 2018 during a 48-game audition. He also swatted five homers and stole seven bases in that stretch, so his 2019 performance is a logical continuation of the trends. Given a full season as Oakland’s everyday center fielder, there is 30/30 potential.

So what are the problems? He strikes out a fair amount – 25.6% last season, 28.4% in 2018 – and only walked in 5.6% of his at bats last year. He’s posted BABIPs of .388 and .342 the last two seasons, so he has been propped up a bit by excellent luck on batted balls. While he has shown pop, he doesn’t have enough power to remain a must-start without a high batting average, so he becomes risky with that profile. The good news is that he only made soft contact about 16% of the time last year, and while he hits a lot of ground balls, he ranked in the Top 8% of MLB in 2018 in sprint speed, so those high BABIPs are more sustainable than they seem at first glance.

Next, the power might not be real. While hitting 24 homers in just 123 games might have visions of 30 dancing in your brain, Laureano never hit more than 14 in the minors, and he’s got a 30/40 Game Power grade on Fangraphs. We’re all dreaming on a 30/30 season, but 15/30 is far more likely. So if we’re thinking .280 with 15 home runs and 30 stolen bases, is he justified at No. 93 overall and 25th among outfielders? I think that’s a slightly lofty ADP, but given the scarcity of steals, and the safety he provides in that category, that’s a perfectly fine place to shoot for the stars on a very promising, young player.