Yesterday I appeared on the 90 Feet from Home podcast, and we talked about surprising pitchers so far.

We're going to do the same on a return podcast with Joe Rico today, 10 slash 12 surprising hitters.

Next on the Rotow Wire Fantasy Baseball podcast.

I'm Jeff Erickson.

This podcast, as always, is brought to you by the good folks at So Rare and at Prize Picks. I'm here with Joe

O'Riko, who hosts the 90 Feet from Home podcast, also writes on fantasy pros. Joe, welcome. How you doing? Jeff, it's been a long time. It's great to talk with you again. You know, always a great pleasure to be on Roto Wire and to chat with you. So it's going to be a fun time today doing the reverse of what we did yesterday talking position players as opposed to pitchers.

Exactly. And I always think that it's tougher to find the breakout hitters. I think with the pitcher side of things, often we find, you know, some indicators that suggest something is coming. We still find our surprises. We also can find pitchers that maybe going through a bit of fluke and we kind of benefit from that

whereas on the hitting side you know they are usually they are what they are with you know at least

I feel that way though this year's results maybe tell say otherwise there so I think it's a little

trickier sometimes to find them I find it a lot harder to analyze batters than it is to analyze

pitchers I find that I'm a lot it's a lot easier to identify the breakouts, at least for myself. When it comes to these hot streaks and identifying them, there's a few players we're going to talk about today, David Fry in particular, it's like, how can you expect something like that to happen? How do you predict something like that? So it is very tricky, but it makes it all fun. It makes it all very fun. Exactly. And if you land on one of those guys, all the better. We're going to start off near the top. The first hit that we're going to talk about, Marcelo Zuna, is not someone that we're shocked that he's hitting well. It's the degree to which he's hitting well, hitting 308, 16 homers, 49 homers, I mean, 49 RBI, 31 run scored. No stolen bases,

of course, no play in the outfield, of course. So he is a UT only, which probably

downgraded him a little bit, or maybe even a lot bit at the draft table. How sustainable is this?

I think it's pretty sustainable. I mean, I know that was the reason I didn't land on him a lot was because of the utility thing, which I told myself I wasn't going to really buy into. And then, of course, it still just kind of stops you because you don't want to clog up the spot. But when you're clogging it up with first round production, I think you're going to be doing all right. I don't know exactly how sustainable it is. The Braves lineup as a whole hasn't even been operating at full speed, and he's still been able to do this.

Once Austin Riley gets going, Mike Harris, Matt Olson, these guys haven't been at 100% in terms of their usual production. Now, losing Acuna is obviously not going to help there. But I think it's fairly sustainable. Now, I wouldn't extrapolate the RBI total.

I don't think he's going to get 150. I think we're probably looking at about 100 ribbyes, probably a very similar season to what he did last year. Maybe the batting average comes down a little bit. He's running a bit hot on the Babbab side. But I think we can see Marcelo Zuna finish easily as a top 50 player this year. It wouldn't surprise me at all. If you're drafting today, how early does he go?

How early are you willing to take him? to finish easily as a top 50 player this year. It wouldn't surprise me at all. If you're drafting today, how early does he go?

How early are you willing to take him?

And we'll say, we'll speculate.

Let's go 12 team draft.

I would say probably somewhere in the fourth round, somewhere in the late 30s to 40s type

of number overall, I think.

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