We still have about a week to go before the non-waiver trade deadline, but already deals are being made. Yesterday, both Jaime Garcia and Trevor Cahill were shipped off of their non-contending teams to the American League. Let’s see how the league, park, and team switches could affect their values.
There are a lot of players in Major League Baseball. There are even more in the minors. I’m not a prospect guy and rarely know names much outside the top 10 in baseball. So when a player is called up, I often times never heard of the player and unless I know him as a top 10 prospect, I generally don’t even bother to do the research to determine if he’s worth a pickup. In a shallow league, 90% of the time, the answer is no. But then that hitter keeps hitting home runs and I wonder to myself “who the heck is this guy?!” Let’s discuss some of those players that led to such a reaction.
Earlier this year, I introduced the new xHR/FB rate that uses Statcast’s Brls/BBE (barrels per batted ball event) metric. While the equation was for hitters, Brls/BBE is still a useful data point for pitchers. Luckily, the Statcast leaderboard has the exact same metrics for pitchers as hitters, including Brls/BBE. Let’s lets discuss some American league starting pitchers from a Brls/BBE and HR/FB rate perspective. Given the hitter xHR/FB rate formula, you know that Brls/BBE and HR/FB rate correlate rather strongly. A mismatch will typically mean some sort of regression in either of the stats.
Is your team not on fire? Are you trying to roll along with Brandon Guyer? Well then, it’s your lucky day, because it’s time for the weekly deep league waiver wire!
Yesterday, I took the first dive into the intriguing waters of Statcast’s Sprint Speed metric. After comparing correlations with other speed-related stats to Spd Score, I now want to see which players are actually faster and slower than Spd would have use believe. Because Spd uses some context-dependent metrics, it could sometimes give us a false impression of a batter’s true raw speed.
In April, Statcast quietly introduced a new speed metric dubbed Sprint Speed. It wasn’t until late June that Baseball Savant made the leaderboards publicly available and we now have data going back to 2015. I have been meaning to dive into the data to find any incremental value, and finally the day has come. From the leaderboard page, the metric is described as thus:
Sprint Speed is Statcast’s foot speed metric, defined as “feet per second in a player’s fastest one-second window.” The Major League average on a “max effort” play is 27 ft/sec, and the max effort range is roughly from 23 ft/sec (poor) to 30 ft/sec (elite). A player must have at least 10 max effort runs to qualify for this leaderboard.
I’ve never performed a mid-season review of my pre-season bold predictions because I typically forget what I predicted and like to be surprised when I recap them six months later. But the article I wanted to write cannot be done, so here I am stepping into uncharted waters. Can you feel the excitement?! My goal this year is to beat my personal record setting 2016 performance of four correct bold predictions. Let’s see if I have any chance whatsoever.
Since 2013, I have polled you dashingly attractive readers on which group of pitchers you think will post the better aggregate ERA post all-star break. The two groups were determined based on ERA-SIERA disparity, pitting the underperformers versus the overperformers during the pre-all-star break period.
Yesterday, I identified a group of hitters worth buying for their home run upside, given the discrepancy between their actual HR/FB rate and xHR/FB rate. Today, I move over to batting average, as I identify the hitters whose xBABIP marks most exceed their actual BABIP marks. These are the guys to target for batting average that you may be able to get at a discount.
The All-Star break provides a much needed rest and a perfect opportunity to assess your team(s). The last time I used xHR/FB rate to identify hitters due for a home run spike was in the middle of May, so now is an excellent time to name names once again. These are the fantasy relevant hitters whose xHR/FB rates most exceed their actual HR/FB rates, which represents a strong list of acquisition targets if you’re looking to bolster your standing in the home run department and are hoping to buy at a discount.
