El Oso Blanco. The man with the niftiest nickname in the game, Evan Gattis. I'm sure after reading the title you think I'm crazy, do not fret, this is a normal reaction. There are some things in baseball that just make you sit back in your chair and go "whoa". That was my reaction the first time I saw Evan Gattis hit a home run. He had something of an up and down season, but by the end of it I was certain of one thing; Evan Gattis is going to have a monster season in 2014. So sit back and let me attempt to turn your doubtful opinion into one of understanding and acceptance.
First thing's first let's just talk about what the man-bear did last season. Gattis first practiced my eye in spring training. If you have not read Gattis' story, Google it. Dude went from being a janitor to playing professional baseball in a year's time. Because of this, he was relatively unknown coming into last year. That was until he used the tree trunk he calls a bat to slug 6 homers in only 57 at-bats while waiting for a stellar.368 in spring training. While yes this was a tiny sample, it was enough to sway the Braves into putting him on their MLB roster to start the season. It's easy to see what the Braves were thinking. If you just look at the guy you can see what excited them. Gattis is a lumberjack of a man, standing at 6 '4 "230 lbs; his power was no accident. Ya know, so there's that.
The second thing I would like to point out is that Gattis is coming into his prime at age 27 in 2014. There has been plenty of statistical evidence that point to 27 as being the age where players enter their prime, so I will not go into detail about that. This may seem odd to some because Gattis was a rookie in 2013, but like I said earlier Gattis did not exactly have the typical path to the majors. Usually when you see a 26 year old rookie you are looking at a AAAA player, but not in Gattis' case. This means we have yet to see Gattis in his physical prime, which if you look at him is kind of hard to believe. This leads me to my final point, Gattis put up close to 40 home run numbers last year, they were just in disguise.
Let's just take a look at Gattis' season last year: 243. AVG, .291 OBP, 21 HR, 65 RBI. OK, now let's put that into context; he did that in a little over a half season's at-bats, 354. That is set to change in 2014, however, as McCann has taken his talents to the Big Apple leaving the starting job to Mr. Evan Gattis. With most catchers I would say it would be tough to get 600 at-bats because they often get one day a week to sit, but considering Gattis can also play outfield I think it is definitely something he can achieve. If we just take what Gattis did last year and project what it could have been if he played every day you get 35 HR, 110 RBI. That is a beast of a catcher, enough to the point you can overlook the AVG and OBP. Now I know those numbers fall a little short of my projection, but I have a perfectly reasonable explanation for that and it takes a little bit of digging.
If we bring up Gattis' 1st and 2nd half splits from last year you can see that the power somehow fell off with 14 HR in the first half and only 7 HR in the second half. When I saw this I thought it was strange considering most of this other numbers were right on par so I got to digging. That's when I bought up his flyball rate split numbers from last year. Now, if Gattis were going through some kind of funk we would expect his flyball rate to fall something, and we did see a little from 47.3 to 42.2, but not enough to make up for the difference. Now, if you look at his HR / FB% you can see the tell, it fell from a ridiculous 23% in the first half to 11.3% in the second half. 11.3 is a really low number for a guy like Gattis and this can be an indicator that a guy was getting unlucky. This is where I think those 5 home runs will come from. Hopefully, if he is nice to them, the baseball gods will let up on him and he can go through a full season without any bad luck.
So what does all this mean? It means Evan Gattis is a man-bear and he is primed to take the fantasy baseball catcher position to a new level and if you do not hop on right now you will be shaking your head at the end of the season. I do not think I have had any crazy arguments in here, and hopefully you agree. I do not think the general population of fantasy players has worn onto Gattis yet so I would think that he is going to be a huge steal in 2014. One piece of advice I would give is if you are going to draft Gattis I would consider drafting a high average guy to offset him, because that is one thing he struggles with. But no one's perfect right? It would not be fair to the rest of us if he did everything.
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