It’s an exciting week with the MLB trade deadline approaching on Thursday, July 31, and many fantasy league trade deadlines lining up accordingly. Whether or not your league matches their deadline with the MLB’s, it’s likely that your league’s deadline is fast approaching. It’s always a good idea to know that information weeks ahead of time and have your negotiations mostly finished by the time the week of your league’s deadline rolls around.
I’m also a big believer in knowing ahead of time which players you want to target, essentially having a shopping list ready, and then opening up discussions with their respective managers. This is almost always going to be a more productive use of time than having general trade talks with the managers you already speak to the most, and seeing what you can get from them. I much prefer to identify which player I want on my team, analyze the roster of their current manager ahead of time, and then open up with an offer that, in theory, should help both sides.
This week’s column will focus on a pair of veterans in the midst of scorching hot streaks at the plate. First, however, we will start by breaking down a rookie that I promise I was already starting to write about prior to him taking over every major sports headline for the weekend.
2025 Stats ( PA): .309/.378/.683; 23 home runs; 59 RBI; 46 runs; 2 stolen bases
Like I said (and I understand if you don’t believe me), I had already targeted Nick Kurtz as one of the three players to include in this week’s column prior to him busting out for perhaps the single greatest offensive game in the history of the sport. That last part is not hyperbole, either. As you’ve likely heard by now, Kurtz finished Friday night’s July 25th game versus the Houston Astros a perfect 6 for 6 at the plate, including a rookie-record four home runs. His 19 total bases for the evening tied him with Shaun Green for the most in any one single game, and his six runs scored marked only the ninth time any player has achieved that feat since at least 1900.
That one game is super exciting to talk about, but it admittedly didn’t do you any good as a fantasy manager if you’re targeting Kurtz in a trade. His value is now obviously higher than ever, as that game vaulted him into the number one ranked fantasy player in all of the last 30-day, 14-day, and seven-day periods. There is a lot of underlying data to suggest you should at least try and make an offer for the young first baseman, though, in the hope that their current manager is either ready to sell and punt towards next season, or if they foolishly believe they can sell high off one game that they may perceive to be more fluke than reality.
I’ll get Kurtz’s weakness out of the way early here—he whiffs and strikes out a lot, which is not uncommon for a young player. His whiff rate is in the 2nd percentile, and his strikeout rate isn’t much more encouraging, sitting down in the 4th percentile. Kurtz does more than enough damage when he does make contact, though, and he does an excellent job limiting chases out of the strike zone, which helps maximize his chances for production. His Process+ rolling chart confirms all of this.
Slightly dragged down by those poor contact metrics, Kurtz’s approach is still able to soar into great-to-elite territory thanks to his solid decision-making and prodigious raw power. Even before his recent hot streak, Kurtz was grading out as a very impressive hitter, especially for a rookie. Now, with the confidence gained from his recent historic levels of production, Kurtz can continue to build on this approach and continue to improve. It’s really only that whiff rate that needs improving, though, as every other metric underlying Kurtz’s current approach jumps off the chart.
As mentioned, the price for Kurtz is likely to be higher than ever. If you’re in a league where you can trade future draft picks, prospects, or any other type of assets deemed expendable for this particular season—and especially if you can choose to keep Kurtz after this season upon trading for him—then it’s time to start putting together your best offer to at least try and acquire this difference-making bat. It’s understandable if you’re then told that he is not on the trade block no matter the offer, but it never hurts to ask.
2025 Stats ( PA): .255/.298/.464; 18 home runs; 62 RBI; 33 runs; 0 stolen bases
Salvador Perez spent the first few months of the 2025 season making many of those rostering him question why they did not just punt on a catcher in the draft, and stream the position with a host of options that were outperforming the 35-year-old Kansas City Royal backstop. He has answered those questions emphatically over the last five weeks or so, particularly in a scorching-hot month of July where Perez is slashing a robust .355/.395/.803 with nine home runs, which is half of his power production for the entire season.
This stretch has made Perez the most valuable catcher to roster in points league over the last month, and it has not been particularly close. Perez has over 40% more points than Cal Raleigh over this stretch, who is the next-best points producer among catchers in the last thirty days. And though Perez still trails Raleigh overall in points by a wide margin for the season, there are good reasons to believe his production down the stretch will be closer to what he has recently shown than to the tepid, powerless hitter he was for the first couple of months of the season.
As can be seen from his Process+ rolling chart, even when Perez was struggling to produce consistent points for fantasy managers he was still demonstrating an above-average approach. Though he has the opposite problem of Kurtz — Perez chases way too much, leading his poor decision-making to drag his overall approach down a bit — he has maintained solid contact metrics throughout the year and has been demonstrating in various ways that the underlying power was still there the whole time, just waiting to break back out.
Consistently barreling the ball and lifting it into the seats, Perez has locked himself into an approach that is both sustainable and potentially league-winning for fantasy managers. The delta that he has been putting between himself and every other player available at his position is too great to ignore, and Perez is a player with enough of a track record to put faith in the fact that he can sustain this success. Especially if you’re currently in a league where the player managing Perez is falling out of contention, it would be wise for Perez to become one of your top targets to focus on. A team beginning to sell-off for next season has little reason to continue to roster a valuable catcher versus stream the position for the remainder of the year, and unless you already have Cal Raleigh, Perez’s production could be what takes your lineup over the top.
2025 Stats ( PA): .249/.354/.471; 20 home runs; 52 RBI; 59 runs; 17 stolen bases
Randy Arozarena was faced with a major life adjustment last season when he was unexpectedly traded from the Tampa Bay Rays, the franchise that he had spent the entirety of his career with up until that point, to the Seattle Mariners. Not only was he leaving Tampa, a city that he had fallen into a mutual love affair with, but he was being sent as far from there as he could possibly go. It was understandable to then see him struggle to find consistent production with the Mariners, having flashes of exciting moments for his new ball club but failing to make a true difference and have the real electric Arozarena-effect that fans have come to know and love when he is really on his game.
As the 2025 season has progressed, however, Arozarena has looked more and more comfortable in his new home. The eighth-best points producer in points leagues over the last 30 days, Arozarena is slashing .281/.349/.688 over that time period with a whopping 12 home runs. This power-heavy stretch has the slugger now at 20 home runs, which puts him well on pace to break his surprisingly low career-high of 23 home runs.
There is always risk for trading for a player who is historically streaky, but this fact should be used to drive down the asking price for Arozarena below that of which many other players with a similar ceiling would go for. His Power+ rolling chart is not as consistent as I normally would like to see from a player that I am recommending, but he has minimized the lulls this season, snapping out of a late-May/early-June slump pretty quickly.
Arozena’s contact metrics were dragging his approach down for much of the season prior to his recent hot stretch, so there is optimism necessary here that he will continue to deploy the approach that has seen him clean up those contact metrics for an almost six-week span now. As long as he can continue to do so, he remains a dynamic athlete whose hottest stretches are capable of coming up clutch in crunch time when fantasy managers need points the most.
As mentioned, it is worth trying to haggle his asking price down a bit on any trade offers due to his historically hot-and-cold nature, but if you can get a reasonably good deal here where the risk is relatively low on your end, Arozarena is someone worth taking a flyer on as a potential playoff winner whose price does not break the bank.
