MLB

Fantasy Baseball: 6 Players Who Have Completely Erased Their Slow Starts

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Anthony Rendon, 3B, Washington Nationals

The Slow Start

If we take a look at Anthony Rendon's cumulative numbers through his first 101 plate appearances in April, they don't look all that bad (107 wRC+, .337 wOBA). That's because he did this on April 30th.

That'll help the ol' stat line out, don't you think?

So, if we ignore that historic performance on the final day of the month, Rendon was actually struggling quite a bit. Through his first 95 plate appearances, he was slashing an anemic .226/.316/.250 with just two extra-base hits (both doubles), leading to a 58 wRC+ and .263 wOBA.

The Hot Streak

Since that historic performance, Rendon has slashed a cool .339/.445/.739 with 11 home runs, 11 doubles, 31 RBI and 24 runs scored in 137 plate appearances. His wRC+ (203) and wOBA (.483) jump off the page, and they help his season-long numbers in these categories climb up to 144 and .393, respectively.

Those aren't the only big differences, though. The below table shows the drastic changes to his line-drive rate (LD%), ground-ball rate (GB%), fly-ball rate (FB%) and hard-hit rate (Hard%) between the two periods of time we've been discussing.

Time Period LD% GB% FB% Hard%
Through April 29th 12.3% 49.2% 38.5% 20.0%
Since April 30th 18.8% 30.7% 50.5% 38.6%


Yeah, that'll turn someone's season around in a hurry.