Author Archive: Jack Martin

Looking back at some of my pieces throughout the year, I thought it would be a good exercise to evaluate how useful some of the strategies and approaches I wrote about were. Bat speed was one area I explored, particularly among younger hitters. While 2026 production alone cannot tell us how well these metrics will predict future success, it can help us identify trends worth tracking heading into 2027.

Bat speed has always been an obvious gateway to success; swinging the bat fast gives a good base to be able to handle velocity and hit the ball hard. While that is not always the case, we have seen an increased emphasis placed on bat speed as a way to raise the floor and ceiling of players. Not everyone can swing the bat like Junior Caminero, but the ability to add bat speed seems to lead to more success. For young hitters, who may struggle with the increasingly imposing level of major league pitching, this can be a good indicator of future success, even if there is a teething period.

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Tracking the 2027 implications of a team’s hitting identity in 2026 is not as clear as on the pitching side, but it is still a good exercise to see what kind of profiles teams had and where they landed upon completion of this season.

To get these trends, I went through every team’s hitting metrics to see where each team landed in the top-3 or bottom-3 extreme of a certain metric. Naturally, there were teams that sat in the top or bottom three of multiple metrics, as many as five, and some were around average in everything.

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In the playoffs, pitching identities become extra apparent as teams look to lean on strengths; the Rays, Brewers, and Red Sox led all of baseball in usage of certain single-pitch types, which helped guide them to playoff places. These trends are by no means a coincidence and make up the blueprint of team ideologies. But these ideologies shift and evolve season to season and can often be useful as a predictive measure of how teams visualize their pitching going into next season, whether that’s molding pitchers to fit their philosophy or bringing in arms that can better reinforce their vision than their current staff.

Going through every team’s pitch usage trends, there were certain teams that stuck to their tendencies. The Brewers’ cutter and the Mariners’ slider-and-sinker profile stayed true, but some notable new trends did occur.

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In an attempt to improve what I find most challenging when constructing my fantasy roster, I found a league this season that could help me address those shortcomings, with the hope that it would also inform my approach in future seasons across all formats. This was joining a league with scoring that heavily favored relievers, with increased points for saves and holds, and minus points for blown saves.

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Midseason, I charted the rookie crop of pitchers using a z-composite score. As the first full season for many of these pitchers wraps up, let’s come back to them to see how they fared and what this means for fantasy value moving into 2027.

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Entering his contract year, Freddy Peralta was one of the biggest offseason moves, coming to the Mets from Milwaukee as a top-20 starting pitcher in fantasy ADP. For Peralta, the Mets, and anyone who drafted New York’s prospective ace this season, 2026 is a year that has not gone as planned. But following a fresh start in Florida, it seems as if Peralta is back on track, at least for now. We will look at this rollercoaster season for Freddy Peralta, what this means for his fantasy value in 2027, and what he can learn from both his time in New York and Tampa Bay.

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Using Statcast data, we can track which of the four aspects of a hitter’s batting stance moved and by how much across each month of the season. In this piece, I wanted to go a step further with some of the names from part one and layer in bat tracking data and batted ball tendencies to see whether the stance changes translated into a measurable swing change.

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Over the course of a 162-game season, many casual fans may be surprised by how much a hitter might adjust their stance and setup. Often, the assumption is that once any athlete reaches the pinnacle of their sport, there is resistance to change, particularly mid-season, and any major mechanical changes are reserved for the off-season. But it turns out hitters are constantly tinkering with parts of their stance, particularly when looking to find some form.

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As we move on to the final stages of this fantasy season, one more splits chart could be beneficial for those looking for streaming options in a playoff run. This chart plots xwOBA vs left-handed pitching (LHP) and right-handed pitching (RHP) on each axis, with filter options for which teams to target depending on their split, with the biggest gap differentials also included. This is done using handedness split data since the break, which now has a big enough sample in its own right while capturing recent form that full-season data would dilute. This piece will identify which handedness offenses struggle with and also look at probable starters up until September 19th, for specific matchups for both pitchers and offenses. Bear in mind this is overall offensive production; there will be specific hitters within lineups that may do well against a certain handedness despite the overall offensive struggles, and vice versa.

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OpenCommand, introduced by Doyoung-Tom Kim, is an absolutely incredible open-source dataset that offers a new way to track pitch locations based on target-miss distance, how far a pitch landed from where the pitcher was actually trying to put it, estimated from the catcher’s setup and camera tracking. Without going too much into detail about the workings of OpenCommand, I would highly recommend checking out his work and the great lengths he went to account for camera angles, plate depth, etc.

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