Yesterday, I reviewed the seven rookie hitters who had recorded the highest plate appearance total so far this season. Let’s continue on down the PA column for a final six.

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I can’t believe it’s been over five years since my daughter stepped in and wrote this post. In a few days she graduates from high school so I’ll be taking the week off (no weekend waiver wire article or chat) to enjoy time with family. As much as we enjoy this stupid game, friends and family mean so much more to us. I’m so pround of Ruby and can’t wait to watch her walk across the stage this weekend. -JZ

Note: I promised my kid she could write one of my articles this summer and as the summer winds down, I’m keeping my promise. -JZ

How do people do this? Writing for like 3000 hours. Then you get all mad that it must be 400 words. And figure out what to write. Then it can’t be big or small it has to be perfect. Then your kids take up all the internet. Then you have to know what BB% and Avg. for the player and it just gets soooo confusing. Then your brother is eating DILL PICKLE sunflower seeds and they smell GROOOOOSSS. When he snaps it and he spits on you. Are we there yet with this article?? This is so boring how do get this to be fun. All you do is sit and write. Then you are all itchy because you mowed the day before and the bugs bit you. Do you know what a parents favorite time of the year is SCHOOL XD. I would rather be in an ac room on my phone than at school. My favorite part of school is leaving 😉 Your brother thinks he can do math but he can’t. Anyway back to baseball. My dad lied to me about Coleverson [Culberson] can’t hit a home run but he did. Anyway, I am done. 204 words.

Post originally ran on August 9th, 2018

We’re about a quarter of the way through the season (sheesh, that went fast!), so now is as good a time as any to review the performances of the rookie hitters. Today we’ll start with about half the crop I ultimately want to discuss, and we’ll do the rest of the freshmen tomorrow.

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In my latest Big Kids article, I noticed three rookie hitters (Tyler Black, Joey Loperfido, and Jordan Beck) are struggling with the major league strike zone. Here are their AAA and MLB strikeout and walk rates.

With the trio seeing major differences, I compared all hitters transitioning from AAA and divided them into those making a debut and veterans. The results line up with what I’ve observed so far, hitters are struggling to adjust to the major leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I identified and discussed the 10 hitters who have raised their fly ball percentage marks by the greatest amount compared to last year. This is important because home runs are a category in the vast majority (all?) of fantasy leagues, and all else being equal, more fly balls results in more home runs. Today, we’ll review the other side of the coin — the hitters who have suffered the most significant declines compared to last year. As a reminder, the odds are the majority of these hitters revert to previous season batted ball type distributions over the rest of the season. However, it’s still a good idea to monitor these rates moving forward as it’s always possible there’s a legit change in approach and these changes stick. If nothing else, the declines here could help explain a disappointing home run total so far.

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Typically when we see a hitter break out in the power department, hitting more dingers than projected, we naturally just assume they are hitting the ball harder, which would likely result in longer fly ball distances, ultimately driving a home run spike. You would therefore see this in an increased HR/FB rate. However, that’s not always how these surges occur. Sometimes, it’s simply a batted ball distribution change. That is, the batter is now hitting a significantly higher rate of fly balls than during the previous season, and might not necessarily be hitting those flies any more optimally.

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We’re about three and a half weeks into the season, which means it’s finally the time to start evaluating your own time’s hot starters and seeking out trade targets amongst the slow starters. While I would imagine the majority of hot and cold starters will ultimately revert back to their preseason projection performances over the rest of the season, the best players to trade are likely your overperformers, while the best targets are typically your leaguemates’ slow starters.

I could identify each of those groups by running year-to-date fantasy dollar values and comparing them to projected fantasy dollar values using our auction calculator, but it’s easier to just use wOBA and xwOBA. So, the underperforming group, your potential trade target list, are those hitters whose actual wOBA marks are most underperforming their xwOBA marks, while the overperforming group are the opposite, representing those you might want to consider dangling in trades if you own any to see if any of your opponents are willing to pay an inflated price.

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We’re already about 10% into the season, so it’s time to take a look at some of the weird, the wonderful, and most extreme of performances. For as long as these types of results remain atop and at the bottom of the leaderboards, we know we’re still in small sample size territory! So let’s review some of the hitting outliers through a couple of weeks of the 2024 season.

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This article ranks the game’s top projected hitting prospects by peak wRC+ heading into 2024 (it does not incorporate any 2024 data). It is a counterpart to this February piece on baseball’s top projected pitching prospects. I only just got done with my offseason methodological updates for hitters–please forgive me for publishing this one week into the season!

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It’ll be a while before we have enough plate appearances in the books to start digging into most of our hitting metrics, but there’s a Statcast metric that could be evaluated without any sample size caveats! It’s maxEV, or the highest exit velocity a hitter recorded on any batted ball. Here, sample size only matters on one side of the coin — the decliners. That’s why today we’re going to dive into the gainers. Surprise, surprise, even after just a handful of games and batted balls, 13 hitters have already hit a ball with a greater exit velocity than last year! Let’s identify the top nine of these names.

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