I put some pretty tight restrictions on myself for this column, as I narrowed it down to players who are both a) owned in <25% of Yahoo leagues and b) were not included in Paul Sporer’s “Nine Unheralded Players for the Stretch Run” column from last week. As it turns out, I managed to come up with three solid recommendations, so let’s get right to it.

Eddie Rosario (Yahoo 20%, ESPN 15.6%, CBS 25%, Ottoneu 32.9%)

It’s not just fantasy players who are ignoring Rosario’s white-hot streak, it’s analysts too. When I looked at CBS to find his ownership rate, I noticed that all three of their experts left Rosario out of their top 100 outfielders when they revised their rankings last week, which is an incredible oversight. Over the last month, the 25-year-old is the No. 25 OF in standard leagues, a performance that now has him inside the top 50 OF on the season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Launch angle continues to trouble me. It might trouble many of you as well, I don’t know. I’ve done a lot of research into which launch angles are the most valuable (10-26), most repeatable (<0 and >26), most common (-10 to 10), and which have the greatest exit velocity (-10 to 20).  These are round numbers, and each batter many differ with regards to their personal swing path or pitch selection.

Even with all of this, launch angle troubles me. Especially when I hear people quoting average launch angle.

In a lot of ways, average launch angle might be similar to average pitch velocity. If a pitcher throws 10% breaking balls and 90% fastballs his average velocity would be significantly higher than if he threw 90% breaking balls and 10% fastballs. Alright, 90% breaking balls is extreme, but you get my point. Maybe it is better to look at the velocity of each pitch independently: the guy has a 95mph fastball and an 84 mph curveball. That gives us a lot more information than saying he has an average velocity of, say, 91.

You have the same sort of problem when you quote average launch angle. Is the guy only hitting the ball to extremes? Maybe he only hits ground balls and pop ups, that would give you the same launch angle as a guy who only hit line drives or a guy who hit a perfectly balanced mix of ground balls, line drives, and fly balls. Using the average feels inherently wrong to me, but I haven’t been able to identify a better way to easily sum up this information. Read the rest of this entry »

The second-best part about Tommy Pham is I can basically recycle this post I wrote about Domingo Santana three and a half weeks ago. Like, I could replace Santana’s name with Pham’s throughout it and you wouldn’t blink. Pham, through his first 628 plate appearances, has hit a home run on more than 28% of his fly balls (28% HR/FB); if sustained for another 72 PA, it would be the third-best mark through a player’s first 700 PA in the last 15 years (among more than 600 qualified hitters).

The best part about Tommy Pham, though, is something Santana doesn’t have, and it’s something more than skin deep. Depending on whom you ask, Pham has swung at pitches outside the zone only 19.8% (BIS), 22.2% (Pitch Info) or 22.9% (PITCHf/x) of the time. Those rank, in order, 6th, 11th and 18th among 205 hitters with at least 250 PA — in other words, the 95th percentile (for the former two) or at least the 90th (for the lattermost). In short, he forces pitchers to pitch to him. Few in the game have been more selective, and few in the game have shown this much power this early in a career. (“Early,” by number of games, obviously, because Pham, at 29, is hella old for a guy who barely has a full season’s worth of PA.) The coincidence of his selectivity and his power is nice, to say the least.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cameron Maybin Propaganda Machine (my and Sammy Reid‘s Twitter accounts) is alive and well, spurning hype for the ESPN Player Rater’s 17th-best outfielder. It feels like he hasn’t gotten much fanfare — he’s still only 62% owned in ESPN leagues with scarcely any mentions this year from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs writers. I wrote about Maybin once but more than two years ago.

A lot of Maybin’s merits — well, once his single merit: his speed — remains intact. A preseason scouting report might’ve said if Maybin could stay healthy and earn the favor of his employing team, he could rack up 30 stolen bases while flirting with double-digit power. Prior to the Juiced Ball Era™, his was the kind of power-speed combo over which fantasy owners would typically drool on draft day yet somehow come to underappreciate on Sept. 30. It would have been fairly easy dismiss Maybin’s 2016 because of an inflated batting average on balls in play (BABIP) and what appeared likely to be a timeshare with Ben Revere or… Michael Bourn? or… it’s much less painful not thinking about his left field partners in Los Angeles of Anaheim.

Dismiss no longer, friends, the former consensus top prospect. Maybin’s born-again speed and his position atop the Angels’ batting order are too valuable to ignore. His full-season (650-plate appearance) pace: 14 home runs, 113 runs, 45 runs batted in, 55 stolen bases, a .257/.353/.400 triple-slash line. That’s immensely valuable, as the Player Rater suggests. Prorating can be a reckless exercise, but little in his peripherals suggests we should expect much, if any, second-half drop-off.

Read the rest of this entry »

A wise man once told me, “Thirty is the new 20.” He spoke not of my dating prospects but of percentages — specifically, strikeout percentages. The gist of his sentiment was back in the olden days, a player’s fantasy value would have been harmed, perhaps irreparably, if he struck out 20-something percent of the time. Now, we see hitters subsist and more with 30-something strikeout rates — Joey Gallo, Keon Broxton, Miguel Sano, Khris Davis and Aaron Judge, to name a few.

We — or, if I dare not speak for you, you intellectual, you, then just I — have been forced to reassess how we (I) “scout” the intersection of contact and power for fantasy purposes. This monologue is peripherally relevant to the eventual subject of this post, Domingo Santana, because he, too, once ran a 30-something strikeout rate. He no longer does that, though, which is good. That’s part of the reason why I’m here. But it’s more of the icing on this cake, so allow me to bake the cake first.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, it seems like there’s a handful of veteran players who go overlooked by fantasy owners. Part of it is likely that these 30-somethings do not excite you anymore. You’ve been scrolling past some of these names for a decade, if not longer. Your eyes simply skim through them on their quest to find that young sleeper who’s about to break out.

Another part of the the puzzle may be that no analysts write about these guys anymore. What would anyone possibly have to say at this point about a player we’ve all been watching since 2005? “He’s still here”? That’s no fun — at least, it’s far less fun than projecting the next breakout performer.

As someone who understands that life isn’t always fun, I hereby declare my intent to remind you that the following three players are worth owning, despite their relatively high ‘old and boring’ levels.

Shin-Soo Choo (17% Yahoo, 17.5% ESPN, 46% CBS, 92.1% Ottoneu)

I understand there might not be anything sexy about owning Choo these days. The guy does turn 35 next month, and spent most of last year struggling with injuries. However, the fact that he’s owned in about 17% of Yahoo/ESPN leagues is entirely unforgivable. Check out these numbers and tell me why he’s on your waiver wire.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I examined a list of hitters who were near the top of the league in exit velocity, while also lagging behind their peers in terms of expected results on their batted balls. For reference, I showed the following chart to explain how batters have performed during 2017 (updated for current games over the past week):

I didn’t do well at explaining this chart, last week. To reiterate, at the footer of the table you can see see that there are currently 395 players with over 30 balls in play in 2017. The numbers shown in each z-score row, display the average metrics for all players with exit velocities in excess of that performance level. For example, those with an exit velocity z-score in excess of 2 have average an exit velocity of 93.96, with an expected OBA of .406 (on same scale as wOBA). Please let me know if any confusion surrounds this chart.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since statcast has been added to MLB parks, exit velocities and launch angles have been a hot topic. Some of this is as simple as a players ground ball rates decreasing, while others dive into a little more detail. For example, showing that a player is hitting more balls into the ideal launch angle ranges for batted balls (19-26 degrees). Regardless, it can be hard to keep track of these changes, or to understand what it all means if you are not familiar with the data. Luckily, Andrew Pertpetua put together this primer. You should definitely read it if you have not already. As Andrew notes, there are a few takeaways.

1. Exit Velocity is more predictive than launch angle in terms of measuring success.
2. Exit Velocity peaks between -10 and 10 degrees.

This follows along with what we should intuitively expect. The harder a player hits the ball, the more likely he is to be making good contact, which should lead to better expected results. Certainly, this isn’t an absolute, but it’s an okay starting point. The less directly a ball is hit – positive or negative launch angles – the greater a sacrifice in exit velocity we would expect to see, at the benefit of a potentially more ideal launch angle. Read the rest of this entry »

As a Marwin Gonzalez owner, I’ve considered writing about him several times over the season’s first two months. I took a $1 flier on him in a 4×4 ottoneu Classic league this offseason, and at the time my expectations could be roughly summarized as “There’s worse ways to fill out a roster.” In most fantasy formats, Marwin qualifies at every position except pitcher and catcher, and he was coming off a season that saw him produce 25 HR+SB. Like I said, there’s worse ways to spend a dollar on a bench player.

Every time I’ve thought previously about writing up Marwin this year, I got hung up on the fact that I had absolutely no idea if his breakout was for real, or if it was just a fluky hot start. Actually, if I’m being completely honest, the whole reason I decided to write this piece you’re currently reading is because I still don’t know. In the following paragraphs, I invite you to join me as I take a stab at figuring out Marwin Gonzalez.

Read the rest of this entry »