Lawrence Butler Is Worth Venturing Into the Unknown For
A Potential 2025 Fantasy Baseball Skeleton Key?
It’s essential to consider every player available for a fantasy draft, but some are worth spending more time on while prepping.
These are your unknown quantities — Wyatt Langford, James Wood, and Spencer Schwellenbach come to mind this winter. We all know what to expect from Manny Machado each year, but nailing the unknown has a significant upside (and a lot of risk).
Gambling on the unknown can lead to the 2024 Nolan Jones experience. It can also lead to Elly De La Cruz. As I once argued, “The competitive advantage lies within the murky waters.”
In other words, the ability to parse volatile profiles is a goal to strive for. Today, we’ll do that for the Athletics’ most exciting all-around player since prime Yoenis Cespedes — Lawrence Butler.
MLB Network caused a stir on Baseball Twitter to kick off 2025 after they tweeted that the 24-year-old could break out this year. This begs the question: Didn’t Butler already break out?
In his age-23 rookie campaign, Butler hit .262/.317/.490 with 22 homers and 18 stolen bases in only 125 games. His 130 wRC+ led all rookies with at least 350 plate appearances. His 3.3 fWAR ranked second on the A’s.
Perhaps the disconnect over the breakout question stems from the shape of Butler’s season. While in Oakland’s Opening Day lineup, he didn’t come with the fanfare that Jackson Chourio and Wyatt Langford did. Fans and fantasy players alike were more concerned with the timelines of Paul Skenes and Jackson Holliday than we were focused on Butler at this time.
Butler hit for a .555 OPS through May 14th and was optioned to Triple-A. He caught fire after returning in mid-June, and from June 30th through the end of the year, he scorched .304/.347/.596 with 20 homers. The only hitters with a higher wRC+ than him were Aaron Judge, Bobby Witt Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Brent Rooker, Shohei Ohtani, and Juan Soto. Buying into partial-season statistics can be dangerous, but it’s a solid three-month sample.
Butler’s dominant second half doesn’t appear to be BABIP-driven, which is assuring. His HR/FB% was high during the stretch, and he doesn’t walk as much as the other hitters who produced similar overall results, so he isn’t without risk. It helps that he had a 20.5 K% during the heater.
Using Robert Orr’s metrics, Butler’s results are promising but not world-beating:
He makes strong batted-ball impact but doesn’t pull many fly balls. His swing decisions are good but are accompanied by poor contact skills. I’d imagine these numbers would look better if isolated to the torrid stretch that began June 30th.
They get there in different ways, but the overall batted ball impact, despite a low pulled fly ball rate, compares similarly to Jarren Duran.
Base stealing provides another path to fantasy upside. Using Statcast’s new metrics, only 12 big leaguers were more valuable swiping bags last season. Butler’s playing time meant he had limited volume but was so efficient that he could accrue enough value regardless.
Statcast pegs Butler as positive in “Outs Created vs. AVG,” which is like saying he avoided negative base-stealing plays. Despite such few opportunities, he wound up with similar overall value to Brenton Doyle and CJ Abrams:
Hyper-aggressive base stealing might not be a part of Butler’s game, but there’s room for him to increase a modest 3% SB attempt rate after going 18-for-18 in 2024. Steamer currently projects 21 steals on 25 tries. I’ll take over on both.
In the second half, Butler was Oakland’s primary leadoff hitter, including against some (but not all) lefties. He’s part of an emerging young offensive core with the A’s, who finished eighth in homers and ninth in barrel% last season. The full impact of the team’s shift to Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park is unknown, but it would be hard to be worse than the Coliseum, particularly for power.
These are additional reasons to like Butler for fantasy in 2025, but we still can’t be entirely confident his final three months of last season are the new norm. In these situations, it’s helpful to compartmentalize our bets:
Must have
Worth betting on
Not a priority
Stay away
“So, did Butler already break out?” I find myself asking. A half-season worth of elite production doesn’t ensure so, mainly when so much of the production was consolidated in a month. Then again, the track record of players who were as good as Butler was in July is pretty short:
He ultimately falls into the “worth betting on” category for me, given the well-rounded fantasy skill set and flashes of utter dominance (July stats, multiple three-homer games last season). The absence of uber-elite batted ball metrics means I can’t be all in.