The best part of small sample stats are the enjoyment we get from finding the weird and the extreme. This year at the beginning of May, I discussed a variety of players riding on one side of the bell curve. Let’s revisit these players and stats and find out how they performed the rest of the way.
Yesterday, I reviewed the 11 hitters I identified back in late April who my xHR/FB rate suggested had deserved dramatically better actual xHR/FB rates. Today, we flip to the overperformers, those who my equation suggested deserved significantly lower HR/FB rates over that first month. While the equation isn’t meant to be used for predictive purposes, a forecast would likely account for that apparent overperformance and project a lower HR/FB rate the rest of the way. Let’s see what ended up transpiring.
A hitter doesn’t have to be selective in order to produce, but it certainly helps. Alex Bregman, Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, George Springer, Marcus Semien and Anthony Rendon were all among the top 10 percent of qualified hitters in terms of O-Swing% this season. In other words, they were among the choosiest hitters, swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone at exceedingly low rates.
Eddie Rosario, Tim Anderson, Javier Báez, Jeff McNeil, Nicholas Castellanos, Eduardo Escobar and Rafael Devers were in the bottom 10 percent for O-Swing%, proving that you can still be valuable in fantasy (and in real, actual baseball) without having even decent plate discipline. Some members of this group are simply good bad-ball hitters. Rosario, McNeil, Escobar and Devers were well above average at making contact with out-of-zone pitches. McNeil also made relatively high-quality contact on those offerings, posting an xwOBA (.314) that was 16 points above the average on out-of-zone pitches for hitters who saw at least 1,000 pitches this season.
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At the end of April, I calculated hitter xHR/FB rate using my equation to determine who had most underperformed at the time. I identified and discussed 11 of those hitters. Let’s see how many of these hitters actually did improve their HR/FB rates over the rest of the season and how close they came to their xHR/FB marks. Remember that xHR/FB isn’t meant to be predictive, but descriptive. The difference being that xHR/FB rate helps us determine what should have happened, rather than what will happen in the future. It attempts to strip out luck, like the majority of our expected/deserved metrics.
If, at this time a year ago, I had told you that between Manny Machado and Marcus Semien, one was going to finish sixth among shortstop-eligible players in 5×5 Roto value and one was going to finish 16th, there would have been no question about which player was going to rank where. But all of us (except for the most prescient) would have been wrong. Semien trailed only Alex Bregman, Trevor Story, Xander Bogaerts, Ketel Marte and Jonathan Villar, while Machado — who played in all but six of the Padres’ games — amassed less value than either Elvis Andrus or Amed Rosario.
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There is no need to beat around the bush with an intro full of cliches and examples. Simply does playing in the postseason wear down a player enough to effect their next season’s production?
Simple answer: Not really.
Less simple answer: Some with hitters, not at all with pitchers.
Complex answer: Danger math.
You know the third base pool is loaded at the top when there are three players at the position who returned more value than Alex Bregman did in 2019 5×5 Roto leagues. Yet, on draft day 2020, owners are likely to at least consider making the Astros’ 25-year-old the first third baseman taken, ahead of Rafael Devers, Anthony Rendon and Nolan Arenado. To this point, in the currently-under-way Pitcher List Experts Mocks, Bregman is the only third base-eligible player to be taken within the first 14 picks in all three drafts.
It’s not hard to see why. This season, he maintained his elite contact and plate discipline skills while tacking on 10 home runs, nine RBIs and 17 runs to his 2018 totals. In 2020, he would appear to be primed for another batting average around .290, and with a spot in the heart of the Astros’ order, he could clear the hurdles of 110-plus RBIs and runs yet again.
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I continue reviewing my pre-season, and now in-season, articles and this is one of my favorite topics. Even though we know (or should!) that any random two week stretch of performance has little to no predictive value, fantasy owners will never stop allowing results from such a short period cloud their evaluation of a player. The most common time for player evaluation clouding is the beginning of the season, when those are the only stats currently in the book. But the funny thing is, by the end of the season, we typically forgot who those slow starters were, especially if they completely rebounded and ended up earning what we paid for them after all. So let’s take a look back at the slow starting hitters I discussed in Mid-April, and checking in on their stats at that point and over the rest of the season.
This season, Yoán Moncada narrowly surpassed Kris Bryant as the most valuable Chicago third baseman in 5×5 Roto value. Figuring out whether he is likely to keep the crown in 2020 is not an easy task.
Even though Moncada made 75 fewer plate appearances than Bryant did, as he missed three weeks in August with a strained hamstring, he outearned his North Side counterpart, $18.0 to $17.0. Moncada made up deficits of 25 runs and six homers by driving in two more runs, stealing six more bases and, most important, hitting .315, which gave him a 33-point advantage in batting average. He improved in every category, other than steals, but Moncada’s surge from a .235 batting average in 2018 played the biggest role in catapulting him into the top 10 at third base (he ranked ninth and Bryant ranked 10th).
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When I wrote my article on disappointing 2019 hitters, the data diverged from expectations in one subset of hitters. Injured players dominated the list but they also saw a huge drop in their production to the tune of about 100 points of OPS. While the season-to-season OPS values are never exactly one-for-one, a 100 point dropped is huge especially since the league’s overall OPS jumped 30 points last season. I needed to dig in.
It’s going to get a little nerdy as I have to explain how I examined the data. To try to minimize the pre and post-injury production from the investigation, I only looked at players who were placed on the IL in March or April. Little if any of their production should have been before the injury. A second reason was to help project hitters who are dealing with offseason surgeries (e.g. Adalberto Mondesi). So, over the past 10 seasons, 627 hitters met these criteria.
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