Last Monday, I discussed Fernando Tatis Jr.’s odd season and the possibility that his missing power output is related to a stance change that hasn’t had the intended effect. I noted the natural next question at the end: what other players have made stance changes and what are we seeing from them? We’ll dig into that today.
Hitting homers is so nice, Miguel Vargas did it twice.
Hey, look, Fernando Tatis Jr. finally created a HR!
If you read Mike Podhorzer’s article this morning (a thing you should have done – if you haven’t you should go do that, and then come back), you would have seen this post:
Fernando Tatis Jr. doesn’t have a power problem.
He has a fly ball direction problem.
MLB HR/FB by Direction:
Pull – 30.7%
Center – 7.8%
Oppo – 3.7%He’s just not pulling his fly balls.
That’s it. pic.twitter.com/tl42YnB0nm
— Mike Podhorzer (@MikePodhorzer) April 28, 2026
Which includes this image:
Fernando Tatis Jr.’s batted ball metrics on fly balls, with a red circle around his 2026 pull rate on fly balls, which is just 4.8%, well below his career norms.” width=”691″ height=”214″ />
When Fernando Tatis Jr. puts the ball in the air this year, he is going the other way more than half the time and up the middle almost the rest of the time. Pulled fly balls are where power lives and Tatis has none of those. Tatis has been a total power zero for fantasy and this might well be why. Figuring out if that will continue requires looking at why he might be pulling the ball less.
Happy birthday, kid.
On the Agenda:
Like many of you, I fantasy baseball at multiple sites (Ottoneu primarily, but also FanTrax, CBS, and ESPN) and so I find myself navigating leaderboards at multiple sites. Kind of.
Yes, I do use the leaderboards at those other sites to find players, but that’s mostly out of laziness. When I have the time and the desire, my preferred way to find free agents and evaluate players is to come back to FanGraphs and use our player pages and leaderboards. CBS can tell me what a guy’s OBP is over the last 30 days; but it can’t tell me what has changed to drive that newfound on-base talent. So I identify free agents at one place, dig into them back here, and then head back to the other place to make FAAB bids or waiver claims.
The integration between Ottoneu and FanGraphs is one of the best and yet most underutilized aspects of the Ottoneu platform. And there are some little tricks you can use to make them even more powerful.
Was that the best defensive game by an outfielder ever?
On the Agenda:
Welcome to the big leagues, kid.
On the Agenda:
They say necessity is the mother of invention. And they are right. But you know what else is the mother of invention? People saying seemingly weird things and then stopping and thinking, “Wait, maybe this is something!”
That’s where the latest Ottoneu innovation came from, and it’s a fun one. During the heat of draft season, when we run out of things to talk about other than the 10,000th debate over Edgar Quero’s auction value, a discussion about slow auctions (the 10,000th of those, too) resulted in people to start making outlandish suggestions about how to run drafts. And then Ottoneu creator Niv Shah commented:
What if players were randomly distributed?
He immediately got an “I would sign up for that” response. I half-joked, “Randomly assigned players with randomly assigned salaries.”
“Error bars around last 10 salary,” Niv replied. “So some variance, but generally market.”
And from that “a random league” was born. And while this sounds like a gimmick there is real interest in it and real value to it (which you can see from that thread). Niv and I will be co-managing a team in that league and I want to talk about a) why I think this is not just an interesting experiment, but a useful concept and b) what Niv and I need to do as managers of our randomly created team.
In the first few days of the season, I have heard (and made!) a number of references to swing speed changes. As fantasy players, we are always looking for that leg up, the first piece of actionable data that we can act on to make a move that no one else is ready to make. Bat speed certainly seems like early useful data. If a guy has gained or lost bat speed, that might not show up in the results yet, and even if it does, we know better than to overreact to a guy hitting one more or one less homer than we might have expected.
But bat speed is subject to small samples sizes, as well. I looked into two specific examples of names that came up this weekend and – in both cases – found reasons to pause before acting.
