Rick Osentoski-USA TODAY Sports
It’s always interesting to analyze fantasy sports when the season is just a few days old. Guys are on fire, guys are cold, but the sample size is so small, that it is difficult to determine whether or not the player’s numbers are a strong representation of what they could do the rest of the season.
Sure, it’s early, but you need to go grab Alejandro De Aza.
If you want to talk about strong starts, look no further than De Aza. Through four games, the talented outfielder is batting .364 with three home runs, four RBI and four runs scored. He’s looked really confident and strong at the plate, dominating fastball pitchers with ease. At age 29, there is still some untapped power potential for De Aza, who belted a solid 17 home runs in 153 games played a season ago. As of right now, the White Sox outfielder is owned in about 60 percent of Yahoo! leagues, and while I don’t think that is necessarily too high or too low, I do think that he is going to be a very good fantasy outfielder for the majority of the season. And it’s interesting because for his career, De Aza isn’t all that great during the month of March/April, sporting a poor .253 batting average with 55 strikeouts. However, he is a career .291 hitter in May, followed by .300 in June. So, if you worry about him not being for real and tailing off (of course, regression is expected), consider that he normally doesn’t perform too well to start the year anyway.
Barring injury, you could be looking at a very cheap 20-home run, 20-steal guy. During his last two seasons, De Aza has very quietly averaged a very strong 23 swipes. 20-20 guys are extremely rare in baseball nowadays, seeing as only nine players accomplished that feat in 2013. Grab De Aza now and you could be stealing from your league.
Adam Pfeifer is a featured fantasy sports columnist for Rant Sports.
You can follow him on Twitter @aPfeiferRS.
