5 darkhorse players we never thought could have a great 2020 season

The 2020 MLB season has gone from its usual marathon to a sprint this year, but that doesn’t mean there are no surprises.

One of the things that make baseball such a great sport is the unpredictability of it.

Of course, you can single out the guys that fans know are going to produce year in and year out. You never know who’s going to burst onto the scene and have a breakout campaign.

This year instead of a 162-game marathon it’s a 60-game sprint so there are more players that can take off this year and have the kind of season that can get them MVP votes.

Now with advanced metrics and all sorts of new tracking technology we can get a better idea of who’s really having a great season, and who’s just getting lucky so to speak and is bound to regress back to the norm.

Every year there’s always a handful of guys that make people stop and look up that teams roster so they can find out who that guy is that everyone keeps talking about. Even in a shortened season that still remains true.

Here are five players that we did not see coming in 2020.

The Tampa Bay Rays made a litany of trades this past offseason to try and bolster their offense ahead of the 2020 season. They brought in Jose Martinez and Hunter Renfroe to try and add more power to the lineup. Unfortunately, it really hasn’t worked out like they’d hoped it would. Martinez only has an OPS of .760 and Renfroe is sitting at a .636 OPS.

When you’re new additions who are supposed to add pop to the lineup don’t get the job done, you need extra production elsewhere. For the Rays that production is coming from Brandon Lowe.

Lowe, in his third season is tearing the cover off of the ball this season. Even though his whiff percentage is bottom 12 percentile in the league according to Baseball Savant, the difference is coming when he actually makes contact.

His barrel percentage and wOBA both sit in the top one percent of the league, and his .699 xSLG is in the top three percent of the league. He’s seeing fewer fastballs and more offspeed pitches this season compared to last season, but when gets a fastball he’s not missing them with a .941 xSLG on that pitch.

Can he sustain the pace he’s on? The short answer is yes he can, so long as he keeps hitting the ball hard when he makes contact. If over the second half of the season he starts making more contact in general especially offspeed pitches then he should actually be able to increase his production. It also helps that his expected numbers are on par with his actual numbers so that means he’s not getting lucky.