Mitch Haniger

Anthony Franco tries to identify the real Mitch Haniger for 2019.

With a couple of weeks of the season now in the books, some early-season performances can start to become meaningful predictors for the rest of a player’s season. While we have not quite hit the stabilization point for most batted-ball statistics, trends are beginning to emerge which may be predictive of the player’s future results. Today, we highlight three mid-20s players with varying levels of certainty regarding their early-season performances. Mitch Haniger, Seattle Mariners Haniger entered the season projected as a…

Fire - Mitch HanigerPerhaps no hitter over the first few weeks has flown under the radar as much as Mariners outfielder Mitch Haniger. Through 23 games, the 23-year-old is hitting .305/.372/.659 with 8 home runs and 24 RBI. Haniger was productive in an injury-shortened 2017 season as well, hitting .282 with 16 homers and 5 steals over 96 games. That power was good for a .209 ISO, but this year he's sitting at .354, which is good enough for fifth in MLB at the moment. He's been primarily batting cleanup or sixth, which…

Each week, I have taken a look at ownership percentages to highlight players who should be considered for potential New Player Claims in Fantrax’s Bronze Points Salary Cap Challenge game. This week, I am also going to add total points into the mix. Please note that using total points rather than points per game will eliminate players like J.T. Realmuto and Yuri Gurriel from the equation. But I still prefer total points for now because points per game is still such a fluid metric at this juncture in the young season. On April…

It is hard to believe we are already on the verge of entering Period 5 in the Fantrax Bronze Points Salary Cap Challenge game. And yet, barely 10% of all games have been played. That’s partly because there have been roughly a thousand postponements thus far, but it does remind us that it is still very early in the 2018 baseball season. Having said that, I think we do have enough data to look not only at the most popular players, but the most popular players among Top 100 teams. Having an idea of who the teams higher up in…