I usually don’t worry about schedule specific details during a regular season since so much can change in a month or two. This season is only going to last a couple of months, so it has some importance. I dug through all of the National League teams trying to find some stretches to stream players. I didn’t find a bunch of one to two-week stretches but I did come to some overarching themes.

I tried to digest as much of the information as possible and I’m sure I’ve missed something obvious. I started the analysis hoping to find a list of week-by-week targets to stream and came away with a new perspective.
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Name value is a helluva drug in the fantasy game and often leads to overvalued players going several rounds higher than comparable players. Sometimes the name value is indicative of a star-level player who has shown heights in his past that are worth betting on at a loftier pick than his would-be equal counterpart, but a lot of times it’s just an opportunity to scoop comparable skills much cheaper.

Here’s one such case at each position using The BAT X projections:

CATCHER

Yasmani Grandal 116 ADP | Projection .235 AVG, 27 HR, 71 RBI, 71 R, 2 SB

Salvador Perez 158 ADP | Projection .255, 28, 81, 62, 0

A big part of this difference is that fact that Perez missed all of 2019 due to Tommy John surgery. Prior to that, Perez put up four straight seasons of 20+ HR with strong RBI counts (for the position) and decent R totals which is exactly what Grandal has done in his last four years. In standard leagues, Perez is arguably better thanks to spiking some useful batting averages over the years while Grandal is always a drag in that position (OBP leagues are a different story as Grandal has a career 14% BB rate). This three-round difference is almost certainly based on the fact that Perez is returning from injury and despite being a Grandal fan, I’ll take the discount.

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In my previous article, I gave an update on my Weighted Plate Discipline Index (wPDI) metric. wPDI arises from the core ingredients of plate discipline – looking only at zone rates, swing rates and contact rates.

An important distinction regarding wPDI, is that its sample size is quite a bit larger than other statistics. Many other stats are based on innings pitched, or even per plate appearance. The denominator of wPDI is pitches. While batter outcomes such as strikeouts and walks stabilize fairly quickly, wPDI can work even faster.

Let’s now take a look at the 2019 leaderboards for wPDI, to see if we can find some undervalued players.

Starting Pitchers

Above is the 2019 wPDI leaderboard for starting pitchers.

Blake Snell lead all starting pitchers in wPDI in 2019. The key to Snell’s success was his “out of the zone” plate discipline. In particular, Snell’s Outcome A (out of the zone, swung on and missed) was the 2^nd highest of all qualified pitchers in baseball. In 2019, Blake produced a K% rate of 33.3%, the highest of his career. He logged a whopping 147 strikeouts in just 107 innings pitched. Both FIP and xFIP (3.32 & 3.31 respectively) agree that his 4.29 ERA last year was somewhat unlucky.

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With so much sabermetric work already completed, I’m creating a ton of work for myself to see if a hitter’s athleticism influences how they age? Additionally, do these “athletes” age better? I tried to jump the gun a few nights ago with an ill-fated Twitter thread where I thought about reverse-engineering the stats. Instead, I’m going to put a value on a hitter’s athleticism using some readily available metrics.

I began my search by using some advice from Bill James who commented on my Tweet.

Let's assert as Point A that "athleticism" consists of four things: Speed, strength, agility and quickness. "Strength" is the most troublesome, because you can have strength in many different body parts, and people who are strong in one area may be relatively weak in others.

— Bill James Online (@billjamesonline) June 7, 2020

He just rattled the traits off and since he’s likely forgotten more about baseball than I’ve ever learned, I’ll just focus on them. I’m guessing he’s already investigated the subject.
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We know that the previous season has a major impact on the following season’s ADP, but I wanted to take a closer look at a comparison between the two and highlight the hitters who have the biggest difference between their 2019 finish on the Auction Calculator and their 2020 NFBC ADP (you can go to the NFBC website, but it’s also built into the Auction Calculator). I used the top 200 ADP players as the cutoff because that captures the group likely to go in virtually every draft.

Let’s take a deeper look and see if these large disparities between the ’19 finish and ’20 are merited or if there’s some value to be mined here. I’m bypassing those with obvious reasons like injury or in the case of the 2nd-biggest faller – Yasiel Puig – not having a team yet.

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Over the past couple years, I’ve really started paying more attention to multi-positional eligibility. As someone who plays almost exclusively in FAAB leagues, I love the added flexibility as it often allows me to target the best free agents every week because I can move pieces around to fit them in. Positional flexibility could take on an added importance in a shortened season so let’s take a look at a team of players with an extra position or two.

Here are the studs being drafted in the top 50 with an extra position: Cody Bellinger (OF/1B), Alex Bregman (3B/SS), Gleyber Torres (2B/SS), and Ketel Marte (2B/OF). You could probably land a couple of them without bending over backwards in your draft, but I’m trying to focus beyond the top 50 outside of one inclusion that I’ll point out when I get to him.

(I’m using the standard 20-game eligibility threshold)

CATCHER

Yasmani Grandal, CWS | Extra Position: 1B

I don’t really think you should ever put catchers at non-catching positions as so much of their value comes from catching, but there’s also the fact that the dual-eligible Cs usually only have 1B as their secondary and that’s often one of the deeper positions available. I said I’d make a full team so I had to include a catcher.

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Last year saw some really remarkable breakouts from unexpected candidates. Ketel Marte had a power explosion, Tim Anderson collected hits at an obscene rate, Hunter Dozier reminded everyone why he was a top 10 pick back in 2013, and Marcus Semien transformed into one of the game’s best players with offensive and defensive improvements. All four of them were in their mid-to-late 20s which made the surges even more surprising as we had locked these guys in at a certain level.

We’ve all heard the phrase that “growth isn’t linear” but given how much we lean on the previous season when studying for drafts, it’s easy to look for that linear improvement. That can leave some players overlooked and make breakouts more unexpected than they should be if we took a broader view.

Here are 7 hitters in their mid-20s poised for a breakout (though a half season mucks things up quite a bit):

Dansby Swanson | SS, ATL

If he doesn’t get hurt last year, the former #1 overall pick probably doesn’t make this list. Swanson was pacing toward a 28 HR/11 SB season with a .265/.330/.468 line before a late-July injury cost him a month. He returned with a .552 OPS and 0 HR in his final 114 PA. There were improvements on the whole, but still netted just a 92 wRC+. He has back-to-back double-double campaigns with top-flight speed and burgeoning power. There’s a .285/25/15 season in here, but he’s overlooked at the insanely deep shortstop position.

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Predicting hitter injuries has been a fool’s errand for me. Besides players with chronic injuries (e.g. Albert Pujols and Ryan Braun), others and myself have made little headway in the field. With few guidelines, many fantasy analysts and owners handle hitter injuries differently. Previously, I focused on a hitter’s recent injury history. This time I attempted a different approach and used the hitter’s career IL days. In the end, I found a useful and easy to remember injury threshold.

For the study, I examined hitters from the 2010 to 2018 seasons. I have IL data going back to 2002, so I hoped the preceding eight years of data would get most of the hitter’s 2010 career total. Additionally, I needed the next season (e.g. 2019) to compare results. Additionally, I set a minimum hitting threshold (100 PA) to include at least some semi-regulars. I know I may miss a hitter who is out the whole season, but the two-week callups were diluting the results. In all, I ended up with a sample of 2365 player seasons.
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About every month, podcast mate Rob Silver pours out his undying love and affection for the Rockies Charlie Blackmon. I’m not as much of Blackmon fan but this comment got me thinking.

To play devil’s advocate:

his barrel% went up.

His exit velocity went up.

His xBA and xSLG went up.

Hard hit% went up.

K% went down.

Prior to last year, he hit 28 HRs with 105 runs in his last 161 road games.

It’s possible last year’s road stats were just noise.

— Rob Silver (@RobSilver) May 10, 2020

Blackmon definitely hit the ball harder last year but so did everyone else with MLB’s juiced ball. Even with noisy data, Rob was right and Blackmon exceeded expectations.
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Fiddle Farts. I’ve been diving deep into my to-do list hoping for a study to verify nothing. This study was not a quick-and-easy one. I’m surprised how much can be gleaned from a small drop in a hitter’s intentional base-on-balls (IBB).

When examining intentional walks, it’s not like canoeing across a calm flat lake with no dangers. Instead, it’s more of a white water rafting with no rest or the end in sight.

Two types of hitters normally see a drop in intentional walks, great hitters on the decline and the eighth hitter in National League parks. Of the 776 intentional walks last season, 410 came from the third (104), fourth (123), and eighth (183) spots in the lineup. It’s a player pool of just the once best and now worst hitters in the league.
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