I'll admit right away that I know nothing about batting "peripheral" stats, so I have no solid idea on whether Rios was lucky last year or just put it all together. But when looking at his stats, I saw a monster increase in slugging percentage. As a rule, a .119 point slugging increase tends to be pretty tough to replicate the next year. He is young, so I don't doubt he improved, but I just feel that it's very likely that some luck or overachievement occurred last year. Somewhat arbitrarily, I'll throw out about a .450 for his natural slugging ability last year. It seems fair, it is still a large increase from the year before, yet it is more believable for a young guy. Assuming he improves again this year, but not by quite as much (he's getting into the prime years, and it's pretty unreal to project him to improve by a ton again), I'd give him another .025 points in the slugging department. On the other side, he still hasn't shown he can take a walk, so I expect his OBP to be about 40-50 points above his batting average. I'll give him the .300 that he hit last year, so an OBP of about .350 next year. That creates an amazing .825 OPS. Granted, this "study" was not scientific at all, but I could see dumb luck making it fairly accurate. Looking at his other stats, give him 20 home runs (3 more than last year) and 15 stolen bases at a little above the break-even rate, and you have another mediocre bat to throw into our outfield mess. If you're an RBI fan, throw in the 82 that he had last year, and he's almost exactly equal to Jenkins, Mench, etc. He has played some CF, but very little, so I don't know how well he could hack it there, but playing CF would make him more valuable. At the end of the day, why do we need another Jenkins/Mench/Corey Hart when we already have them on our team? EDIT: What Sam said. I would rather have a guy clearly on a rising trend than a guy who exploded out of nowhere. It seems like a lot safer bet.