Jake Marisnick was a third-round pick for the Toronto Blue Jays in the 2009 Draft. After honing a do-everything centerfield profile for two seasons in the low minors, he began popping up on industry Top 100 Prospect lists reaching as high as 28 in 2012 with a low of 79 prior to 2014. In mid-November of 2012, he was a key piece in the mega-deal between Toronto and Miami after a two-level season that saw him rip through High-A before the rich talent of Double-A stymied him en route to a .622 OPS in 55 games.

He repeated Double-A in 2013 with his new club and enjoyed much better results (.860 OPS in 67 games). Results which were enough to earn him a call to the bigs in late-July, but he couldn’t get it going with the Marlins. His strikeout and walk skills were identical to Double-A, but he languished with a .478 OPS in 118 PA thanks in part to a .232 BABIP. Marisnick would find himself being dealt again in 2014, this time in a smaller, but still substantial deal. The Astros acquired him with some minor leagues (including #6 overall pick from ’13 Colin Moran) for Jarred Cosart, Enrique Hernandez, and a minor leaguer.

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There’s something beautiful about an empty canvas because of its potential. The painter can turn it into literally anything — anything from a masterpiece to utter crap. The painter can make mistakes. She can paint a miserably bad portrait, yet still have time to amend it, perhaps creating an entirely different work — a different and better portrait, the ugly original buried deep beneath several layers of paint. The final product is a marvel, though the journey there was not smooth nor seamless.

Or right from the start she can paint the perfect landscape. And that’s great, except she continues to paint until it is no longer the masterpiece it once was but a mess of dimensionless color, unrecognizable and void of merit.

Such are the stories of the seasons of MLB hitters. A player can suffer a miserable April — the ugly portrait — yet slowly build up to a respectable end-of-season stat line. Conversely, a player can have a monstrous April — the perfect landscape — yet watch it slowly fall apart over the course of the next five months.

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After looking at base stealing options last week, today we’ll shift focus to the home run department. Both players on today’s list are mostly available, though they come with flaws attached to their home run potential. Without further ado, let’s take a look at Colby Rasmus and Chris Young. Read the rest of this entry »

Often times I get my player ideas for this column from the bids in AL Tout Wars. Unfortunately, that means my recommendations typically learn toward American Leaguers, rendering National League owners $hit out of luck. My apologies. But you’re in luck! This week actually features a player from each league.

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It’s tricky to write about batted ball mix changes, for the most part. If you’re talking push and pull, adding the ability to go the other way can increase your batting average, sure. But it can also decrease your power output. Ground balls and fly balls act the same way — there’s really an ideal mix for each hitter, and we’re trying to figure out just as much as they are which is the best way forward.

There’s one batted ball type that just plain sucks, though. The pop-up. The infield fly.

98.5% of the time, that’s an out. It’s a bad idea, plain and simple.

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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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