Here’s a shock; Reynaldo López holds the sixth-best WAR and sixth-best FIP (as of games through 9/28/22) among qualified relievers in 2022. If you rostered him from the start of the season until now, which I’m sure you didn’t, you would have accumulated five wins, leveled out your ERA with a 2.84 contribution, and almost certainly lowered your overall WHIP thanks to his career-low 0.93.

In 2022 López lowered his BB% by nearly eight percentage points and increased his K% by over five percentage points when compared to his 2020 season. Just look at how his statcast percentile ranks have changed over that time:

How did he do it? I won’t dance around the answer trying to build tension, I’ll just deliver it up front; he became a reliever and started throwing harder. In 2022, he only started one game and in that start against the Texas Rangers on June, 10th, he only threw two innings, acting as an opener in what essentially was a bullpen game.

At the end of the 2020 season when López was 26 years old and holding a 6.49 ERA, the White Sox didn’t know what to do with the big righty. He started nine games and only threw 57.2 innings. In 2021, he bounced back and forth between reliever and starter roles, and in his reliever roles, he averaged two innings. In 2022, only 14 of his 59 games have gone over one inning. When a pitcher knows he is only going out for one inning, he can put a little more ompfff in his fastball:

It would certainly seem that throwing the ball harder on all of his four pitches used in 2022 has led to overall improvements, but each pitch on its own has improved in Whiff%. In addition, his overall out-of-zone swing % has improved.

So, is it that simple? Throw the ball harder for a shorter period of time and you’ll be better? You’ll double your WAR in a single season and you’ll more than double your WAR from two seasons ago? Decreasing his FIP has gone a long way when it comes to increasing his WAR. If a pitcher limit’s their home run totals while also limiting the walks they give up, they are on their way to an improved FIP.

But the real kicker here is that while he has lowered his FIP, increased his Whiff%, increased his Chase%, lowered his ERA, his WHIP, and his BB/9, López has held an unsustainably low HR/FB rate in 2022. He has only given up one home run on the year. Last year, he gave up 10. It’s not necessarily crazy for a reliever to give up only one home run. So far in 2022, there have been five qualified relievers who have given up one home run and 14 qualified relievers have given up only two home runs. But, scroll back up and look at López’s statcast percentiles and you will see that he still gives up hard contact.

In every year of his career, López has been above the average of balls in play that are fly balls. If he is still giving up hard contact, but in smaller samples as a reliever, and he is still putting the ball in the air more often than the average, yet he is no longer giving up home runs, what will happen?

Steamer projected 13 home runs to be hit off the Chicago righty, but to be fair, he was mostly projected as a starter. Regardless, let’s re-calculate his FIP on the year and throw in five more home runs for a total of six. His FIP is now 2.96 which is more in line with his xFIP of 3.27. Finally, here’s the point: Reynaldo López has gotten lucky this year with home runs. He has limited his walk rate and the home runs he has given up tremendously, but it’s not sustainable.

This may seem like an off-season article, but we’re nearly there. You may be looking through leaderboards and you may notice López’s excellent reliever WAR standing to finish off the year. You may notice his FIP. You may notice his velocity increase, his new role, and his improved whiff rate. Don’t get me wrong, López has had a nice season. It has been a great way to bounce back and become relevant once again. But, hidden under all those improvements, is fly ball/home run luck.

If you drafted Yasmani Grandal based on Steamer’s 2022 pre-season projections, you were likely preparing to play in an OBP league. Grandal was projected to finish the season with the tenth best (tied with Max Muncy) OBP at .373. The 2021 league average OBP was .317. If you were to now head over to our 2022 leaderboards, you would see Grandal is holding a disappointing .279. But, narrow down that leaderboard to only viewing qualified catchers. The first thing that you may notice is that there are only seven catchers on the list and that Grandal is one of them.

You’ll also notice that Grandal’s .279 OBP is third from the bottom, yet his 12.2% BB% ranks first (high), his 18.4% K% ranks second, and his 7.6% SwStr% (low) ranks first. He’s walking and he isn’t striking out. That marks off two of the three true outcomes. Homeruns, being the third true outcome, have not come more than twice for Grandal, and that coupled with a .210 BABIP and a .180 AVG have probably made those rostering Grandal feel a little uneasy. But, if those same fantasy managers are believers in regresión a la media, then they are sitting pretty.

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This early in the season it’s easy to jump all over players who are putting up big numbers. But just remember, you drafted a team while considering their projected season-long stats and while it may be tempting to drop a poor performing player at the start of the season for a hot starter, take caution. Players who hit doubles and triples and home runs early in the season can make a lot of noise, as they’re likely to put up strong category stats. Isolated power is a nice statistic that allows us to see, “how often a player hits for extra bases”. But, ISO does not stabilize until around 16o at-bats, and it will probably take another two weeks or so before we can really call this a good sample size. Let’s take a look at players who have shown strong early season ISO, how it compares to the ISO they showed at the start of last year and how that compares to their career average. Read the rest of this entry »

You know how the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…uh, well, you can’t fool me again cause you already fooled me” (ref).  Rowdy Tellez must have said something similar, maybe even the proper phrase, while sitting in the dugout waiting to get another shot at Kyle Hendricks‘ changeup. That’s because Tellez struck out swinging in his first two at-bats against Hendricks on opening day. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I pointed to the great research done before me that shows that a player’s BABIP is likely to regress to their previous 3-year average. What’s the point of doing this before drafting? Well, it allows you to see players who may be over or undervalued. In the case of last week’s post, you can find players who may have gotten lucky and will likely do a little worse, hit-wise, in 2022. For example, last week’s analysis showed that Starling Marte, Brandon Crawford, and Kevin Kiermaier topped the list, in that order, of hitters who outperformed their 3-year (2017-2019) BABIP in 2021. Furthermore, I performed a cluster analysis that tried to explain just how these players overperformed. That allowed us to figure out if there was a skill change or not. Let’s do the same thing for players who underperformed in 2021.

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Work done by Voros McCracken has shown that a batter’s previous 3-year BABIP is a good predictor for next year’s BABIP, it is known. Here’s a quote from our own glossary:

..changes in BABIP are to be met with caution. If a batter has consistently produced a .310 BABIP and all of a sudden starts a season with a .370 BABIP, you can likely identify this as an instance in which the batter has been lucky unless there has been a significant change in their style of play.

 

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Those who have been smart enough to pick up a copy of the 2021 Baseball HQ Forecaster (and likely posted a picture of it to their Twitter) have already read through the “Other Diamonds” portion of the text. It’s my favorite part. In it, there is a section called Paradoxes and Conundrums and it states that a player’s year to year improvements can be labeled as, “a point in a growth trend, an isolated outlier or a complete anomaly…” I loved that line when I read it. But, so much strange happened in 2020 and I think it should have some say. In this post, I’ll go over three pitchers who increased their K% from 2020 to 2021 but whose gains might be skewed by the 2020 season. Two of these pitchers really just rose back up to where they were in 2019. An increase in K% is wonderful but is it a trend, an outlier, or, to incorporate my own twist, to be expected?

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A player’s spot in the lineup is crucial to the amount of RBI they accumulate. What’s even more important is the production of the player hitting in front of that player. Have I stated the obvious? Probably. But, it’s easier to write down analytical laws in an agreeable way than it is to actually take a look at the data. In this post, I’m going to investigate the RBI production of players who had at least 100 plate appearances on teams in the NL West according to their most common lineup spot. Let’s see if hitting in the three spot is more productive from an RBI standpoint than the one spot, as they say it is.

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Arguing price is something that has been going down since currency was made out of copper coins and some of the coins had holes in the middle. In today’s world, price negotiators say things like, “$3.15 a gallon for gas?! You’re out of your mind!” or “I’m not paying over $3 for a watermelon, I’m just not!” Whether you’re the type to wait for a sale on underwear or the type to just go and pay what you pay because, well, you need it, all of us can relate to the idea of arguing a price. In my last piece on Kyle Freeland, I made the case that he’s worth $4. I was immediately argued with (politely, that is) about that price, and you know what? I may be overpaying. But, that’s the beauty of price! It’s here, it’s there, it’s really up for debate. So, let’s do it, let’s try this: Garrett Hampson is not worth $8 in FanGraphs points Ottoneu leagues. Here’s why:

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I recently took over an Ottoneu team for the upcoming 2022 season. If you are unfamiliar with Ottoneu, it’s keeper league where you get to make trades from mid-November to January 31st. Any players left on your roster after that you keep, using the auction draft to fill in the missing pieces. Taking over someone else’s team kind of feels like moving into an empty office. There are a few cobwebs in the corner, the previous owner left a really cool pen in the desk drawer and there’s a very stinky sandwich in the staff refrigerator that you somehow feel like is your new responsibility.

The fun part is taking stock of what you have and trying to decide what you want to keep (cool pen) and what you want to cut (stinky sandwich). In this series of posts, I’ll write about the decisions I have to make, how I go about analyzing the data before making my decision, and then what decision I plan to make. You too could be doing this kind of thing, all you have to do is take over someone’s abandoned team and search through the desk drawers when you move in.

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