Over the past three years I’ve had a lot of fun studying quality of contact stats, and I’ve tried to put everything I have learned into xStats.  This uses exit velocity, launch angle, running speed, park factors, temperature and more to measure a player’s offensive performance and displays this information in the form of basic slash line items to make it easy to understand for any baseball fan.  You’ll see stats like expected batting average, slugging, BABIP, and wOBA. (xAVG, xSLG, xBABIP, and xOBA, respectively).

Recently I’ve run 7 day, 30 day, and 60 day stats, giving an insight into players who have been out or under performing their game results in recent weeks. Today I want to touch on a few of the batters I find particularly interesting, and I’ll include a little table showing a few other notable players as well. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure of the exact Sleeper and the Bust podcast but Paul and Eno were discussing Jeff Samardzija and how his ERA would look better without a Colorado start. Right now Samardzija’s ERA is 4.31 but if the seven run, five inning start in Colorado is removed his ERA drops to 3.81. I’m not a fan of removing starts from a pitcher’s stats. The good and bad will happen. The deal is that Samardzija owners probably sat him that week like I did in Tout Wars. If owners aren’t going to use pitchers in their Colorado starts maybe owners should start ignoring the stats generated there.

The increase scoring environment in Colorado is about impossible to overcome. In an article at Rotowire ($) last year, I stated the following:

What we do know is that the road pitcher should expect between a 1.00 and 2.00 increase in ERA. I might put the ERA drop near 1.50, but I could understand if an owner wants to use a smaller or larger number. Additionally, I will put the K/9 drop near 0.9 and the WHIP increase at .25.

Those increases are just too much to absorb over an entire season. Sure an owner can get away with a start every now and then but eventually, the odds will even out. Once the hammer drops, an owner will spend a couple weeks trying to recover their overall rate stats.

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As a Royals fan, I had my doubts Jorge Bonifacio would be a major league contributor. Over the past couple of seasons, my opinion has changed as he showed some power in AA in 2015 (17 HR) and AAA in 2016 (19 HR). I fostered some reservations on the AAA power because he played in the offensive happy Pacific Coast League.

He’s started 2017 off great with 3 HR and a 10% HR/FB ratio in AAA before getting his major league call-up. Since the promotion, he’s hit six bombs with a 29% HR/FB rate. Owners may be expecting some heavy regression from Bonifacio but they shouldn’t. The “juiced” ball era has reversed a trend of position players hitting for less power once getting a major league promotion.

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Back in early April, I wrote a Five Under 50% post in which I implored fantasy owners to invest in the likes of Nick Franklin and Dan Altavilla. I urged readers to steer clear of Marwin Gonzalez, and promised that Edwin Diaz’s job was as safe as they come.

Naturally, Franklin has a 38 wRC+, Altavilla has a 6.60 ERA, Gonzalez has a .419 wOBA, and Diaz is no longer the Mariners closer. Sorry about that.

Before you quit reading this post because, really, why should you trust me, just know that my predictions weren’t all terrible. I also forecasted success for Scott Schebler (.365 wOBA), Mark Reynolds (.419 wOBA), and Ryan Zimmerman (.469 wOBA), who have been among the best hitters in baseball this year.

Not every gamble will pay off. But when it does, it can transform a fantasy team. It’s been about a month and a half since my last Five Under 50% post, and with renewed confidence, I’m prepared to do it again now.

Below are five (actually seven; I cheated) players owned in less than 50% of Ottoneu leagues whom I think may be worth an add in most leagues. There’s no need to jealously yearn for these players later when you can win them now for pennies on the dollar.

1. Chris Taylor (2B/SS/3B; 39%) Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made it almost a month since I made the following declaration on investigating prospect Hit grades:

I am going to stay away from more Hit tool predictions until I have collected every one of MLB.com’s prospect grades from 2013 and 2014, not just the top 100. I probably will not be able to compare many to their major league stats but I can with Triple-A.

I broke my position after collecting MLB.com’s 2013 grades. I ventured forward without the 2014 grades. With this larger and more diverse dataset, I compared the hitters’ grades to their batting average, home runs, and stolen bases in both AA and AAA.

Trying to better understand the Hit tool stems from finding it doesn’t contain any predictive power. When looking at players with different grades, major leaguers ended up posting similar batting averages. I concluded two issues were causing the production to level out.

First, hitters needed a talent and/or production baseline to get into the majors. Some hitters with below average grades were under-graded and produced up to the MLB baseline. Additionally, “better” hitters were over-graded but still had just enough talent to make the majors. This talent convergence tends to average out the grades.

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Last week, I analyzed the 2016 home-to-first times for hitters. With the background information out of the way, I’ll examine at the 2017 speed data to find who’s running the faster and slowest, who’s changed the most since 2016, and how home-to-first times compare to Bill James’s speed score.

With all the Statcast batted ball data getting analyzed, I continue examining the home-to-first times. Fantasy owners may believe speed is mainly used to determine stolen base threats. It’s more than that.

It’s an input to many other fantasy related factors which can help explain a player’s age-related decline. Faster players will beat out a few extra ground balls for hits thereby raising their batting average and on-base percentage. Speed allows a player to score more once on base. It can add to a hitter’s power profile. Also, speed can help keep a player maintain their fielding range at a premium defensive position instead of moving to a statue-like position (e.g. first base). Finally, a drop in running speed may point to an injured player.

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One month through the season and those playing ottoneu are likely getting a clearer idea of if they are buying or selling. It’s a tricky pendulum, as no playoff structure exists. In determining to sell, owners are likely targeting players who have performed much better than expected over the first month. While there are several ways to determine who these players are, one of the most common ways is to examine projections to see which players have actually improved. Today, I want to look at a couple of pitchers who have improved their projections the most, while examining a couple underlying skill changes that may or may not exist in each of these. The degree of these changes represents my willingness or unwillingness to buy.

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Our Dark Overlord, David Appelman, finally acquired a minor league pitch-by-pitch database as seen by the new minor league stats available like Contact and Groundball rates. I hoped it would help to better understand the disconnect between a prospect’s Hit tool grades and major league results.  I made some progress but created more questions than answers.

When I examined the database, I was hoping to find some batted ball information as Eli Ben-Porat used at the Hardball Times. No such luck. But there was some x,y data … for every pitch.

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At the time of this writing, there are 37 major league hitters with a wRC+ of 150 or higher. There are the usual suspects: Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Nolan Arenado are on the leaderboard to no one’s surprise. There are exciting young prospects, including Mitch Haniger, Aaron Judge, and Joey Gallo. Then there are unexpected names like Eric Thames, Cesar Hernandez, and Robbie Grossman.

Lengthy articles could be, and have been, written about any of the players above. One player who hasn’t received much publicity despite some relatively prolonged success is Grossman.

He checks in with a 158 wRC+ in 67 plate appearances so far this year. Steamer projects a .322 wOBA and 99 wRC+ for the rest of the season (ROS), and that projection puts him just a few ticks behind his highly-touted teammate Max Kepler. Although Kepler is three years younger and may have a higher ceiling, the point is that name recognition can play a pretty big role in how we analyze players.

Also, Grossman used to be bad. From 2013 to 2015, he had just a .281 wOBA and 77 wRC+ in 202 plate appearances against left-handed pitching, despite being a switch hitter. Since 2016, however, Grossman has a .417 wOBA and 166 wRC+ in 170 plate appearances against lefties. Even with his early-career struggles against lefties, Grossman now has a lifetime .344 wOBA and 118 wRC+ against them. Read the rest of this entry »

Just before the season started, the FanGraphs staff (including RotoGraphs contributors) was asked to make its official predictions for the upcoming season. We took our best shot at predicting the playoff teams, MVP and Cy Young Award winners, and Rookies of the Year for 2017. Perhaps in the coming weeks we will check in with the top picks for MVP and Cy Young, but in this article, we’re going to look at the top rookies.

Our staff picks on the American League side had Andrew Benintendi (40 votes) as the overwhelming favorite to be named the league’s top rookie, with Jharel Cotton (4) and Mitch Haniger (4) rounding out the top three.

Over in the National League, Dansby Swanson (27 votes) was the favorite by a wide margin, followed by Robert Gsellman (12), Manuel Margot (5), and Hunter Renfroe (4).

While it’s extremely early and still much too soon to make any concrete statements about who will win this year’s awards, let’s take a look at the wide-ranging early season performances of the players we expect to be the game’s top newcomers: Read the rest of this entry »