It’s been a few weeks since we covered several rookie hitters. Rookies have been making a significant impact on the fantasy baseball landscape from a pitching and hitting standpoint. Several rookie hitters and pitchers have been starting in fantasy lineups instead of simply being stash candidates. These rookie hitters have name value, so they could be possible candidates to buy, sell, or hold based on their underlying metrics, skills, playing time, and peak projections. Read the rest of this entry »
With all of the preparation that goes into draft season, it’s easy to throw that all out of the window when you come into June and a guy is hitting .180 and has fallen far outside of the top-ranked players in the majors.
This is especially true for managers in 10- and 12-team leagues. In these formats, the quality and depth of the waiver wire is never better than it is in April and into early May.
Contrast that with the struggles and small sample size bloated ERAs and miniscule counting stats, and it is easy to see why so many of us contemplate dropping players we considered ourselves excited to draft just a few weeks before the season.
In this article, I’ll look back at some of the hitters the industry liked heading into this season, noting their current roster rates and player rater values, and why you should consider buying back in while you still can. I’ll start with players who have already demonstrated some value of late and wrap up with blurbs on some names who could be next.
You must be able to see it, Mr. Manager. You must know it by now. You can’t win. It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Manager? Why? Why do you persist?
Because you choose to. Because sifting through recently discarded hitters is your jam. Because the occasionally interesting platoon bat may just be set up for an interesting occasion.
So, why do we persist? Because we all do. Why play fantasy baseball if not to savor the constant oneupsmanship. Oh yeah, pal o’ mine, you’re going to burn your FAAB on the hot young prospect? So what, I’ve got the entire Rockies lineup in Bing Bong Ballpark in Vegas this weekend.
Beat that.
In this article, I’ll use the Fangraphs Lab Baseball Sim tool to highlight some potential hitters to stream in this weekend’s juiciest matchups. And I’ll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes and the extent of how you can use the Sim tool yourself.
In mid-April, I introduced my process of reviewing matchups and schedules in two- to three-week windows to identify outliers and potential short-term gains. The basic premise is that rest-of-season (ROS) analysis has high margins of error and that it is better to compartmentalize fantasy decision-making into short-term timeframes. We do not know who will get hurt and whether a specific team would be a good or bad matchup one month or two months from now. In that April article, the Chicago White Sox and New York Mets stood out as positive outliers. The White Sox crushed over the 3.5-week window, ranking fourth in runs and top three in isolated power and wRC+. The Mets were a huge letdown, though they were without offensive leader Juan Soto and other key hitters for parts of that stretch. Soon thereafter, Francisco Lindor joined the injury party.
Welcome to this week’s iteration of Position Player Playing Time Changes. As with last Friday’s post for pitchers, I added some new columns to better contextualize the percent changes. Since each team has, on average, 92 games remaining, the rest-of-season remaining plate appearance totals are pegged to that number, in addition to showing the percentages as usual. That should help you better wrap your head around the impact of the changes.
Remaining Projected Playing Time Changes, Hitters, 6/2 to 6/9
Who says only pitchers change throughout the season? Of course, batters do too, and with newfangled metrics like BatSpd, it’s easier to identify the driver(s) of such changes. So let’s identify and discuss the hitters whose BatSpd has changed most over the last 30 days compared to earlier in the season.
Streaming pitchers is a much cleaner exercise than streaming hitters. And oftentimes, the expected production is relatively more guaranteed. But in an offensive environment where hitting seems to be increasingly hard to find on the wire, then playing hot hands, and even better, trying to predict hot hands, becomes worthwhile.
That’s what I’ll try and do in this article. At the team level, I’ll point you to the teams who are playing the most games this week, the teams playing in the friendliest hitter’s parks. Then, I’ll look more into platoon splits, playing time, and how hot they are heading into the week to try and identify a crop of hitters you should consider streaming. To limit the player pool to hitters who are likely to be available, I’ll only use hitters who are around 50% rostered or less in either Yahoo or CBS leagues.
This is my first attempt at this exercise. I’ll try and provide plenty of information to help you make decisions that apply to your league and team context, from position eligibility to rostership rates.
Please let me know in the comments if there’s other information that’d be helpful, format changes, or any other potential changes!
