It’s tough to call any fantasy baseball players overvalued or undervalued less than one month into the 2025 season. No team has played more than about 12 percent of their games, and sample sizes are infinitesimal compared to what we normally need to make long-term judgments on players.
However, based on early performance, team usage, and changes to a player’s approach or mechanics, it’s already clear some players were undervalued in fantasy baseball draft rooms while others appear to have been overvalued.
This weekly piece will look at the past seven days of fantasy baseball performances to see who should be considered overvalued and undervalued going forward. When necessary, I will reference the Fantrax top 500 rotisserie rankings for the 2025 fantasy baseball season.
(Stats are up to date as of April 21)
Undervalued Players
Spencer Torkelson (1B – DET)
After 31 home runs and 94 RBI in 2023 for Spencer Torkelson, things were looking up for 2024. Unfortunately, injuries and terrible play derailed his season, and he finished with just 10 home runs and 37 RBI in 92 games. That was then parlayed into an ADP around pick 375 in spring drafts, as he became a forgotten man among the ranks of first basemen.
Spencer Torkelson has since shown he can get back to that massive power and run production season in 2025, his age-25 season. Torkelson has seven home runs and 21 RBI already through 25 games and 102 plate appearances. While his strikeout rate has remained the same, he has increased his walk rate to a career-high 13.7% and cut his groundballs to a career-low 32%. That’s a recipe for success when combined with his hard-hit approach.
Torkelson, according to Statcast, is above the 80th percentile in barrel rate, exit velocity, and sweet-spot percentage. Those numbers are all career highs and are contributing to the power surge early in the season, even though Torkelson plays half his games in a tough hitters’ park.
Brice Turang (2B – MIL)
Brice Turang went 4-for-5 (with a walk) on Tuesday night against San Francisco to raise his batting average up to .337 to go along with eight steals and three home runs. Those numbers have put him near the top of all second basemen in rotisserie formats, and he now has 32 hits across 24 games in 2025.
Turang had a mini surge up draft boards late in the spring, but he still was picked around 135-140 in many drafts as fantasy managers were cautious of the low power numbers and potentially fluky 50 steals from 2024, considering his unknown playing time. All of that now appears to be much ado about nothing. Turang is solidified in the leadoff spot. He is playing every day. He is showing some speed and pop, and appears to be one of the draft season’s steals at the middle infield positions.
Turang still hits the ball on the ground too much (57% of the time), but his sprint speed is in the 95th percentile, so he is able to turn a lot of those ground balls into hits. Those then turn into steals and runs, which have made Turang one of the most undervalued players in the early part of 2025.
Tyler Mahle (SP –TEX)
Tyler Mahle is leading all of Major League Baseball in ERA despite being drafted after pick 400 this spring. His 0.68 ERA through five starts is the best of any Rangers’ starter in their history through five games. On Sunday against the powerful Los Angeles Dodgers, Mahle pitched seven innings, allowed five baserunners, struck out four batters, and did not give up a run.
The last time Mahle gave up an earned run was on April 9, when he gave up one run in seven innings to the Chicago Cubs, another one of the hottest offenses in baseball. That’s the only run he’s allowed this month, with one start to go. This is a 30-year-old pitcher who has had three seasons with ERAs around 5.00, so something clearly changed coming into 2025 to produce these kinds of results, especially after injuries piled up last year.
While many pitchers are moving more and more towards the breaking ball, Mahle is leaning in on his fastball. He is throwing it 54.4% of the time this season, up from 52.8% in 2024. Mahle has been injury-prone each of the last two seasons, so maybe we should take a strong start with a grain of salt. But he is now close to 97 miles per hour with the fastball and is working on a new pitch that has had excellent results.
In 2024, Mahle never threw a cutter. In 2025, he unveiled one and is throwing it over 10 percent of the time. That pitch has a 43.8-percent whiff rate, and Mahle has not allowed a hit off of it this year. If Mahle can consistently generate two wipeout pitches against batters, he is going to be hard to stop in 2025.
Overvalued Players
Marcus Semien (2B – TEX)
On Tuesday night, Marcus Semien batted fifth for the Texas Rangers. That may not seem like a big deal, but it was the first time since joining the team in 2022 that he hit any lower than third in any game with the Rangers. He proceeded to go 2-for-3 with a home run and a walk. Did that move down spark something in Semien that has been missing all season? Hopefully, because he has been downright unplayable for some time.
Even with that home run, Semien is hitting .160 on the season with a .478 OPS. His 44% groundball rate heading into Tuesday night was the highest of his career, and his 31% hard-hit rate was his lowest since the partial season in 2020. Semien has been unlucky with a .159 BABIP (he is at .281 for his career), so there should be some variance there. But at 34 years of age, it could just be that this is the cliff Semien is starting to fall off as he moves solidly into his mid-30s.
As of April 21, Semien was ahead of only Joey Ortiz in slugging percentage this season. That will change with his big night on Tuesday, but there is a pattern across 21 other games that may be too much to ignore.
Eugenio Suarez (3B – ARI)
Remember the first five days of the 2025 season when Eugenio Suarez had five home runs and was crushing everything he saw? Those were fun times, but they are definitely over at this point. Over the last two weeks, Suarez has devolved into a player who can’t make contact, doesn’t have power, and is barely worth starting on fantasy rosters.
In the last 11 games, Suarez is hitting .150/.209/.275 with one home run and a staggering 44% strikeout rate. His swing and miss tendencies have come roaring back, and now pitchers are figuring out where to pitch him to make sure he does not make solid contact. On the season as a whole, Suarez is now at .156/.261/.429 with only the one home run since the first week of the season.
He has the lethal combination of an increased swing rate on pitches outside the zone, but a decreased contact rate on those pitches. He is also making less contact in the zone than at any point in his career (67%), and it appears some big adjustments need to be made. That’s something no one would have thought possible after the first five games of the season.
Robbie Ray (SP – SFG)
In fantasy baseball, there are pitchers who walk a lot of batters, and then there is Robbie Ray. At 6.66 walks issued per nine innings, Ray is more than a full walk per nine higher than any other qualified pitcher in Major League Baseball through four weeks. If that wasn’t bad enough, Ray is also one of the ten worst pitchers at giving up home runs this season (1.85 per nine innings), as his performances with the Giants this season are starting to truly fall apart.
His strikeout rate is under 10 Ks per nine, his groundball rate is under 40%, and his 14% barrel rate allowed is the highest of his career. We have seen Ray go through these wild swings in seasons before. Sometimes, like in 2021 and 2022, he is able to course-correct and deliver fine, even Cy Young-caliber seasons. In other years, things go off the rails, and he cannot get things back on track.
He missed a ton of time in 2023 and 2024 with injuries, so this could be Ray working himself back into shape and building up velocity and endurance, but so far, there have been no signs of progress. Ray has at least three walks in each of his last four starts and has only surpassed four strikeouts twice this year.
