Yesterday, I noted that Carlos Gonzalez’s isolated power, as determined by my expected isolated power (xISO) equation, mirrored his current production. This would be great news if we were talking about CarGo circa 2013.

Unfortunately, we’re talking about the 2015 incarnation of CarGo, he of the .109 ISO, .188 batting average and .233 batting average on balls in play (BABIP). The latter-most statistic might be the first talking point a proponent of his brings up in his defense: CarGo’s BABIP is atrocious right now — it’s just a matter of time until his bad luck turns around. Indeed, there may be some truth to this sentiment.

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In my constant search for stolen bases I tend to hit the waive-wire pretty hard. As such, I often find myself picking up players with sub 10 percent ownership. While some of these names are being pressed into service due to injuries to teammates, some have the potential to stick around for the season. Their rate stats may not be pretty, but most fantasy teams can survive one poor batting average or on-base percentage without losing too much ground. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s deep league wire features a pair of fresh outfielder call-ups. Both were one-time promising prospects, but have struggled at the big league level. Are these two post-hype sleepers?

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A stat that we don’t talk about much just hit the stabilization point, meaning it’s offering us more signal than noise. Pull percentage! It only takes about thirty balls in play to stabilize, and so it’s fairly easy to quickly see if a player has changed their approach at the plate in this way. Even opposite field percentage, which takes 65 balls in play, is pretty much stable for most hitters by now.

A player we do talk about a lot is Jorge Soler. Dripping with upside, the slugger hasn’t performed quite to expectations this year, whiffing more and looking a bit lost at the plate sometimes. As a consequence, he keeps showing up in trades, as some look to use the remaining promise to cash in, while others see this as a last chance to buy an emerging slugger.

Let’s look at the player through the lens of the stat.

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Man, I am having a blast with the Baseball Info Solutions batted ball data that was recently added to the batted ball leaderboards. Sure, there are reasons to complain: the batted ball spray and contact quality statistics lack context, leaving you in the dark about how spray and contact intersect. For example, there’s Hard%, and there’s LD%, but how many of a hitter’s balls in play are hard line drives? (You can actually find this data on individual player pages under the “Splits” tab — just not on the leaderboards.)

Just because the available data aren’t as granular as one might wish they were doesn’t make them worthless or unusable. Yesterday, I demonstrated that we can still achieve small gains in our understanding of batting average on balls in play (BABIP) using the new data.

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Shin-Soo Choo is no longer elite. He used to be, though. Back in 2009-2010, he put up a pair of excellent .300, 20/20 seasons which yielded a 139 wRC+, good enough for 11th in baseball. Just two years ago in a much tougher scoring environment across the league, he hit .285 and went 20/20 yielding a 151 wRC+ (9th-best). The move to Texas wasn’t really an upgrade in park, but it didn’t project to really hurt him, either. After all, his best work came in Cleveland which is hardly known as a hitter-friendly ballpark (these days it plays plus for LHB, though not overwhelmingly so).

Injuries marred his debut season in Texas resulting in an uninspiring effort that saw him hit 13 homers with a .242 AVG, .714 OPS, and just three stolen bases (in seven attempts) in 123 games. Both the ankle and elbow injuries that nagged him throughout the season required surgery and so there was a reasonable expectation of health for Choo coming into the season. His 2014 campaign offered a discount as he sank to the 51st outfielder off the board this draft season. Given the wretched first month to his season, it’s hard not to wonder if either of last year’s injuries or perhaps a new one has cropped up for Choo.

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Last week I posted the AL OF tiered rankings for May and used my favorite films from 2014 as tier labels. In the comments section I briefly discuses with one reader, The Theory, about my enjoyment seeing fellow South Koreans get their shot in Hollywood. I suggest seeing The Good, the Bad, the Weird — currently available on Netflix — as I really enjoyed it.
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Through the magic of fantasy sport position eligibility designations, Odubel Herrera is looking like one of the more flexible fantasy options available on waiver wires. The time to pick Herrera up is dwindling by the day, if not gone entirely already, in most leagues, but he is still a player worth looking into for trade purposes or for those in long term leagues that want to know exactly what they have.
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For the first time in years, Justin Maxwell is in demand.

OK, so it’s not a crazy, opening-scene-of-a-Beatles-movie demand, but still, his ownership has jumped 20% in CBS leagues in the past week, and for good reason: He’s off to a hot start. He has an .843 OPS entering Friday’s play, and, for about a week after wrestling away the starting rightfielder job in San Francisco from Gregor Blanco, he had been tattooing the ball with a .333/.407/.833 slash line before he ran into two guys named Kershaw and Greinke. He’s been blasting line drives at a 34.2% clip, the fly ball rate is back to a healthy percentage, and although it’s a young season, his average batted ball distance of nearly 300 feet backs up his 20% HR/FB ratio.
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NL OF Tiers: March (Preseason) 2015
Also, David Wiers’ AL OF Tiers: May

This is my second ever installment of tiered rankings so, I admit, I’m still figuring out how to properly balance a hitter’s present and future values. It’s too easy to rank them by, say, their current ESPN Player Rater rankings, but it would be foolish to still rank them simply by expected end-of-season value, as I did in March.

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