Fantasy Baseball Outfield Overview: How to rank a healthy Kyle Tucker; Woods, Chourio, Langford on the verge

The MLB offseason continues its cold spell as the weather turns riding in the Northeast. However, we can still press on and take stock of what happened in 2024 and see what lessons we can learn for 2025. In order to do that, we’re going to go position by position to break down the overall landscape and help find the best pockets of value.

Similar to last year, when I wrote my State of the Union for each position, I’m going to look at the value produced in 2024 by regular starters at each position to see where the most value is coming from each position and identify areas of strength that we can target in our drafts and areas of weakness that we can try and avoid. Last year, much of my analysis was based on the impact of the new rule changes, so this year we’ll just look at the overall landscape and see how much carried over.

Table of Contents

A few weeks ago, we started with first base and then covered second base, third base, shortstop, and catcher, so now we’ll wrap up by talking about the outfield. To get a quick sense of the position, I looked at how many shortstops earned $10 in value according to the Fangraphs Player Rater.

Not a huge change here with only two fewer outfielders earning double-digit value in 2024. We have too many players here in the outfield to break down every player who entered the list or fell off the list, but we can highlight a few of the big names who failed to hit double-digit value in 2024, and you’ll see injury as a huge component of it. In 2024, none of Kyle Tucker, Ronald Acuna Jr., Michael Harris II, Adolis Garcia, Randy Arozarena, or Josh Lowe hit double digits despite doing it in 2023. In fact, Lowe posted a negative value in 2024. Of that group, only Arozarena and Garcia played a full season in 2024.

All of which is to say, I’m not making too much of the slight dip in fantasy production in 2024.

Category Breakdown

Now we’ll see what value the outfield position provided in each standard category in a Roto 5×5 league. I sorted by players who accumulated 300 plate appearances and looked to see if there was any meaningful change in the standard 5×5 offensive categories (batting average, home runs, runs, RBI, and steals). I did this for 2022 and 2023 last year, so we’ll compare those numbers and then dive into WHAT changed, WHY it may have happened, and HOW it should impact our 2025 draft plan.

Batting Average

I bumped the batting average…