For my next few articles, I am going to examine batters and pitchers who have changed their approach from the second half of 2016 to the first half of this season. Today, I will start with the hitters.

For hitters, I found how far their stats changed, in standard deviations, from the league average in these five categories:

• Strikeouts (K%)
• Walks (BB%)
• Groundball Rate (GB%)
• Pull Percentage (Pull%)
• Isolated Power (ISO)

Then I binned the change as good or bad. I determined “pulling the ball” (can be shifted) and groundballs (fewer line drives and home runs) to be bad. If a person disagrees, they can change the values found in this spreadsheet and create their rankings.

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We are officially in the second half of the season. I know, I know, people like to call the All Star Break the middle point. I can understand why, it is a natural (artificial) divider in the season in the same way a river or a mountain range may divide countries. Personally, I prefer to look at the game totals, and there are fewer ahead of us than there are behind us.

Players who got off to hot starts have mostly come back to Earth. Mostly. Aaron Judge is seems to have enough delta v to effect an Hohmann transfer, so he could be leaving Earth at any moment. Beyond that, players should be settling into their normal, expected production for the season.

Speaking of expected production, the halfway point seems to be a good time to take a look at power numbers, particularly home runs. For the past few years I have run a little side project called Citi Field Homeruns, where I meticulously track the home runs in Citi Field, aiming to measure the impact of changing ballpark dimensions. Okay, so this explanation is largely irrelevant to my goal here, other than to establish a few small pieces of information: Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I stole RotoGraphs contributor Joe Douglas’ idea (with his permission) as I pointed out that the “generic” Tommy Pham had provided surprisingly similar offensive production in his career to the “brand name” Michael Conforto. It was a fun exercise, and one that we’re going to do again today.

To set the stage, we’re going to talk about two rookies with outfield eligibility. One receives plenty of attention and hype; the other, not so much. Mr. Generic debuted in 2016 but is still considered a rookie this season, while Mr. Brand Name debuted in 2017. Here’s how they’ve fared so far this year:

The first thing that jumps out is the nearly 100-point difference in BABIP, and the fact that Mr. Generic’s BABIP is perhaps unsustainably high. More about that in a minute.

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Yesterday, I listed a slew of hitters whose HR/FB rates sit far higher than we expected heading into the year. But there have been so many darn surprises, I felt the need to continue discussing names. These are the guys that I literally do a double take when I see their HR/FB rates and think “wait…WHAT?!?!”. Once again, I included their xHR/FB rate marks as well to help gauge how sustainable these surprise power sources are.

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Let’s continue our perusal through the various leaderboards, returning back to power and HR/FB rate. We’ll go through the HR/FB leaders, include their xHR/FB rate marks (not adjusted for home park) and marvel of their awesomeness.

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Last week, I discussed the two month BABIP underachievers, identifying names whose marks fell significantly below my xBABIP. Now let’s take a look at some of the hitters whose low BABIP marks are actually validated by xBABIP. These are the guys who at first glance, your knee-jerk reaction might be to expect a dramatic rebound, but the underlying skills that drive BABIP suggest there has been little bad fortune involved. That’s not to say that the hitters are going to maintain such weak skills, but that looking backward, the poor results have been legitimate.

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Last week, I discussed the two month BABIP overachievers, identifying names whose marks significantly exceeded my xBABIP. Now let’s take a look at some of the hitters whose high BABIP marks are actually validated by xBABIP. These are the guys who at first glance, your knee-jerk reaction might be to expect heavy regression, but the underlying skills that drive BABIP suggest there has been little fortune involved. That’s not to say that the hitters are going to sustain such skills, but that looking backward, the results have been legitimate.

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Over the past few days something very odd has happened in baseball. Somehow, some way, Zack Cozart has become the active fWAR leader. Okay, this may not be as big a surprise this afternoon as it may have been when you first heard about this, but it is still pretty crazy, right? Or maybe you saw him sneaking up the leaderboards over the past few days or weeks. Either way, it has happened. He’s now number one amongst the active players, and perhaps he’ll soon overtake Trout for first amongst all players.

In terms of fantasy, WAR doesn’t carry much weight, of course. Especially for a guy like Cozart who generates a solid chunk of his value through defensive excellence. Even still, Cozart is posting numbers at a rate that far exceeds his career numbers. He currently stands with a .351 batting average and a 1.059 OPS, up from his career .254 average and .704 OPS.

Zack Cozart has below average exit velocity, only 84 mph. We’re not talking a touch below average, either, he’s more than a full standard deviation below with a z-score of -1.37. All this made me curious about where exactly he sat on the exit velocity spectrum, whether there are other similar outliers, and if there is anything we can learn from them. Read the rest of this entry »

As we get deep into a baseball season, it’s hard to keep up with everything going on day-to-day and when you step back and take a look, there will be several surprises or at least interesting tidbits that may change your outlook on a player for better or worse. Here are 20 hitting tidbits you may not have realized:

Did You Know…

• Alex Avila has nine home runs in 134 PA, trailing only Salvador Perez and Austin Hedges (11 each), who have done their damage in 220 and 185 PA, respectively
• Yadier Molina has 11 HR+SB (6 and 5) in 209 PA, tying his 2016 total done in 581 PA
• None of Anthony Rizzo, Miguel Cabrera, Wil Myers, Jose Abreu, Eric Hosmer, Chris Davis, Hanley Ramirez, or Edwin Encarnacion are among the top 10 fantasy 1B…

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Yesterday, I discussed a swath of hitters whose BABIP marks sit significantly higher than their xBABIP. Today, it’s time to look at the underachiever list, which is probably more actionable than the overachievers. Let’s take a gander.

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