American League

Angels

• Brandon Drury (.824 OPS, 5 HR, 0 SB) has started in eight of the last 10 games.

• Chad Wallach (.978 OPS) and Matt Thaiss (.814 OPS) are splitting the catching duties. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I reviewed some of the early 2023 outliers in various hitting metrics. Since there are so many metrics, we’ll continue on the fun. Yesterday, the focus was on strikeout and walk rates. Let’s now flip over to batted ball metrics.

Read the rest of this entry »

In past years, I have reviewed some of the most extreme performers in various categories after around a week of play. Though not necessarily actionable, it was fun to see the players and stats that stood at the top and bottom of the leaderboards. It’s a bit later than I have normally reviewed the weird and the wonderful historically, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any wackiness going on! So let’s review some of the outliers a couple of weeks into the season.

Read the rest of this entry »

American League

Angels

• Gio Urshela, Jake Lamb, Brandon Drury, and Luis Rengifo may not be startable or even rosterable until one wins a full-time starting spot between first and second base.

• Zach Neto (.136/.240/.227) has started six straight games. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I reviewed the hitters who have most underperformed their xwOBA marks so far, which included a number of names that would make for good trade targets. Today, let’s flip over to the overperformers. I hesitate to make a blanket statement that these guys should be sold high if possible, as each deserves their own evaluation. So let’s dive in.

Read the rest of this entry »

As everyone knows, the shift was banned for this season with players needing to be on the infield dirt and just two on each side of second base. I’m going to take an early glance to see if more hits are happening because of the extra holes in the infield and shallow outfield. Overall, the results ended up close to expectations but are noisy in some spots.

For the shift information, I’m using two rates, the full and strategic shift designations. For clarification, here is the explanation of the “strategic” shift from Baseball Savant.

A “strategic” shift is our current catch-all for positioning that is neither “standard,” nor “three infielders to one side of second base.” More granular categories, like “guarding the lines,” “five infielders,” etc., may be added in the future.

Examples of this often include just a single player being out of position, like a second baseman being shifted to short right while no other fielders are, as in the image above, or a shortstop moving very close to the second base bag, outside of the usual shortstop zone, but not quite moving to the other side of it.

During the offseason, I examined how the shift might affect individual players and the league-wide BABIP. For The Process, I looked at players moving from the full to the strategic shift. I used the strategic values since defenders could still move around this, just not as much as before. It was far from perfect, but I felt it was better than assuming no shift. Here are my conclusions from the book.

Jeff looked at into several solutions, including taking handedness into account, and ended up with the following formula to estimate a player’s change in BABIP:

BABIP Gained = Full Shift%^2 * 0.035

League-wide in 2022, 34% of all shifts were a full shift, so using the above formula, the league-wide BABIP is expected to jump by .004. On the whole, not that much.

And here are expected individual hitter BABIP gains for various full shift amounts.

On the league-wide value, I was off a bit with the league-wide value so far going from .243 to .249 or .006. Close.

As for the individual players, I bucketed the players into 10% point groups for anyone who hit in both 2022 and 2023. Then I found the Harmonic mean of the plate appearances to help weigh the yearly change. First, I bucketed just the full shift values.

The top and bottom 20% came out near expectations with decent jumps for the most shifted players and no change for those who weren’t shifted. Now in the middle, values bounced all over the place.

I wondered if those in the middle were being strategically shifted a bunch and adding those shift values might clean up the results. I reran the test with the full and strategic shift rates combined. Here are the results.

The results stayed the same. The top and bottom 20% are nice and clean while the middle bounces around.

In both cases, I highlighted the results for those who see the particular shift two-thirds of the time. In each case, there was about a 15-point jump in BABIP and an ~8-point jump in AVG. The results so far match the preseason expectations and in a month or so, it will be time for another check-in.

We’re about two and a half weeks into the season, which means impatient fantasy owners are going to start cutting or selling low on their slow starting hitters. Before making such rash decisions, it pays to check out the hitter’s Statcast xMetrics. While the metrics have their flaws, it’s the best data we currently have to determine a hitter’s expected performance given their actual batted balls. So let’s review the hitters who have most underperformed their xwOBA marks. This could be your early trade target list if you don’t own these names, and if you do own them, perhaps it’s a reminder to hold strong.

Read the rest of this entry »

American League

Angels

• Gio Urshela (.756 OPS, 0 HR, 1 SB) has started in all but one game and has played six games at shortstop.

• Brandon Drury (.556 OPS) may only be starting against lefties. Read the rest of this entry »

With only around 7% of the season in the books, it’s still far too early to evaluate the majority of performance metrics. But we still want to analyze something, so let’s review the hitter SwStk% improvers versus last year. I chose SwStk% instead of strikeout rate, as the former has a 0.76 correlation with the latter from 2018 to 2022. There’s less noise in SwStk% than strikeout rate, so it’s a better skill metric to evaluate this early, rather than an outcome statistic. Remember, the sample sizes here are small and contact ability could fluctuate throughout the season. But hitters improve their strikeout rates all the time, which could lead to a breakout given the additional balls in play. Cutting down on swings and misses could be an early sign that such improvement will either continue or occur soon.

Read the rest of this entry »

Usually, the larger the sample size the better when evaluating a metric. However, that’s not necessarily the case when looking at maxEV, Statcast’s peak exit velocity reading for a particular hitter. While you wouldn’t want to ding a hitter whose maxEV has declined versus last year after just a week and a half of games, you do want to celebrate a hitter who has already increased their maxEV after such a small sample of balls in play. You can’t really fake hitting the ball harder, so it’s possible that an increased maxEV is an early sign of a power spike. Let’s review the maxEV increasers and see if we can find any interesting names.

Read the rest of this entry »