Buy or Sell on Players With Rough Starts to the 2025 Season
Several of the league's top offensive players are off to slow starts at the plate. Will they stay cold or start to turn it around soon?
The 2025 MLB season is officially in full swing. Home openers have all been held, every team is in the win column (barely, in the case of some teams), and Shohei Ohtani is still an alien of a baseball player.
Speaking of players, some of the league’s best ones have had mixed results to start the season. You have your guys who have gotten off to blazing-hot starts (we see you once again, Mr. Judge), and you also have guys who have started off ice cold.
There is still plenty of time for that latter group to turn things around. After all, it’s a 162-game season, and on average teams have just under 150 of them left to go.
But which players will start to click, and which ones might see their struggles carry further into the regular season? Here we’ll look at six players and decide whether to buy their slow starts or sell expecting them to turn it around.
Stats and rankings taken prior to play on April 9.
Yainer Diaz: C/1B, Houston Astros – Buy
Having lost two of their top players this offseason in Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman, the Astros at 5-6 and third in the AL West have been a little slow out of the gate. So has one of their expected top hitters, Yainer Diaz.
The 26-year-old has just two hits in 33 at-bats to start the season while scoring only once and driving in just one. He’s already struck out 10 times to go along with things.
Diaz’s batted-ball luck has been atrocious at a .087 batting average on balls in play, and it doesn’t help that he’s been popping a majority of balls up into the air with a 45% fly-ball rate to start the season. Between that and the elevated strikeouts, it’s a perfect recipe for a slow start.
Alec Bohm: 3B, Philadelphia Phillies – Sell
The Phillies are off to another strong start at 7-2 and sitting a half game behind the division-leading Mets. The offense has been potent at over five runs per game, but third baseman Alec Bohm hasn’t been a big part of that.
The third baseman has started the season going just 8-for-40 in nine games with a double as his only extra-base hit so far. He’s also walked just one time to start the year.
Though the production hasn’t been there, many of the advanced stats have. Bohm ranks in the upper percentiles in several stats, such as strikeout rate (80th percentile), hard-hit rate (81st), exit velocity (88th), and whiff rate (96th). It shouldn’t be long before the hits start falling for him.
Mark Vientos: 3B, New York Mets – Buy
Lo and behold, another NL East third baseman. Mark Vientos has gotten off to an even slower start than his Phillies counterpart, going 5-for-40 with two runs and an RBI, though he has walked six times.
While Bohm’s underlying stats show a possible turnaround, Vientos’s don’t. His 32.3% hard-hit rate and 31.0% whiff rate are in the 23rd and 25th percentile, respectively.
Vientos had a breakout year in 2024, hitting .266 with an .837 OPS, 27 homers, and 71 RBIs in 111 games. Prior to that, he had just a .205 average and .610 OPS in 81 games. With a start like this, it’s still hard to tell who the true Vientos really is.
Ceddanne Rafaela: OF, Boston Red Sox – Sell
The Red Sox have spent much of the last several months locking up many of their young stars. One of those was Ceddanne Rafaela, who signed an eight-year, $50 million extension last April.
Rafaela hasn’t exactly been a heavy hitter to start his MLB career with averages under .250 and OPS under .670 in each of his first two seasons. He’s gotten off to an even slower start in 2025, though, going 8-for-35 with no extra-base hits in his first 11 games.
While the numbers aren’t quite there yet, his contact numbers have been close to career averages, and he’s walking a little extra and striking out less early on. One big difference is that he’s hitting things into the ground early, about 12% higher of a rate than last year. Assuming that regresses to the mean, his other numbers should as well.
Luis Robert Jr.: OF, Chicago White Sox – Sell
The White Sox currently find themselves exactly where they ended last year — in the AL cellar with the worst record in the league. It doesn’t help that their best player, Luis Robert Jr., is starting off with another down season.
Robert is 6-for-34 to start the 2025 season with a double, an RBI, and three runs scored. He has struck out 12 times, which is tied for 20th in the AL, though his strikeout rate has been similar to recent seasons.
Outside of a groundball rate that is up 8.4% over his career average, a majority of his contact and discipline stats are close to career averages, including his hard-hit rate. For now, we might have to just wait and see what happens as the beginning of the year continues to progress.
Triston Casas: 1B, Boston Red Sox – Buy
As expected, the Red Sox offense has come out swinging (pun intended), sitting at fourth in MLB at 5.5 runs per game so far in 2025. They do have one slugger lagging a bit behind, though.
Triston Casas has started his season going 7-for-39 with 13 strikeouts, tied for 14th in the AL. He’s provided a little better run production than the rest of this group having scored three times and driven in three with two doubles and a homer.
Though his hard-hit rate is way down at over 10% below his career average, his barrel rate and swing speed have been just fine. What he needs to do is be more patient, as his walk rate is down 6.7% while his chase rate (+7.2%) and first pitch swing rate (+11.6%) are up. Hopefully it’s just a result of early-season jitters and he settles in soon.
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Matt Carroll is a writer for Just Baseball and former site expert at Reviewing the Brew. He studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently…