Detroit Tigers: Which Tigers do you want on your fantasy team?

Victor Martinez

Rotoballer rank: 241 Target round: 25

Victor Martinez, like Cabrera, is an aging slugger who had one of the worst seasons of his career in 2017. While Cabrera’s downfall last season was cause for concern, Martinez’s looked like the end of the line for the 38-year-old. He managed to hit just .255 with 10 home runs and 47 RBI, making him fantasy irrelevant in most formats.

However, there is more to the story than what meets the eye with V-Mart. Martinez’s walk-rate and strikeout-rate each stayed roughly the same between 2016 and 2017. Additionally, his percentage of hard-hit balls and medium-hit balls went up, while his soft-hit rate went down. That typically points to a breakout season, but the opposite happened.

The primary reasoning was that V-Mart, while he was hitting the ball harder, was hitting way too many ground balls. Martinez doesn’t exactly light it up on the basepaths, and a slow runner like him needs to hit more fly balls and line drives in order to find success.

Fortunately, V-Mart has typically hit more balls in the air in years past, and 2017 may have just been an anomaly. If the switch-hitting DH is able to drive more balls in the air next season, we could be looking at another season like he had in 2016: .289, 27 home runs and 86 RBI.

While expecting those numbers may seem a bit ambitious, there is plenty of reason to expect V-Mart to have a much better season in 2018 than he did last year. For that reason alone, he is worth taking at the very end of your fantasy draft. If he is not able to perform, he can be dropped for a variety of players that went undrafted.  But if he can return to form, he is an absolute steal in the 25th round.

Fantasy team name idea: Attention V-Mart shoppers