Archive for Stat Breakdown

Fantasy baseball is a stats game, both in terms of scoring (you are literally trying to maximize certain stats) and in terms of building a roster (you use stats to figure out who to roster). But if you play in daily lineups leagues, almost all of the stats we look at are presented in the wrong format for your purposes, particularly for hitters.

When you check out Michael Conforto’s player page, you will see he has 8 HR and a .243 average in 160 PA, which puts him on a 30-HR pace for a full season. You’ll also see him at 3.44 P/G in Ottoneu points leagues. But if you have been moving him in and out of your lineup based on when he does/doesn’t start, and you look at what he has given your team, you’ll see something more like 5 HR and a .223 average, with 4.06 P/G for Ottoneu points leagues. Why has Conforto been better for your team in points leagues (though, to be fair, still not good) and worse in roto?

His starter/substitute splits.

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Building on the bat speed piece from last week, I wanted to explore some deep-cut young finds based on swing length, blast contact rates, and all the rest. It turns out that if you swing fast, swing fast often, and make consistent contact, you are already highly valued, not just in fantasy but in baseball. Sorting these different metrics gives you a pretty similar list of names at the top of a chart.

For the first piece, I intentionally stuck to bat tracking metrics as much as possible, rather than outcomes, to compare the mechanical profiles of young hitters and to see whether we can use that on its own to predict future success. The problem is that the swing data on its own cannot tell the difference between an MVP candidate and a prospect who has been overmatched. Pete Crow-Armstrong sits in the same neighborhood as Marcelo Mayer, and no amount of bat speed or blast rate separates them.

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Right now, the Major League level seems about as full of young talent as it ever has been. High-profile prospects are more prepared than ever to make the leap, skipping past the slow grind of the minor leagues to make an immediate impact at the big-league level. This season, Kevin McGonigle and JJ Wetherholt have proven it: the former made the All-Star roster, and the latter absolutely should have been included.

Of course, bat speed is not a guarantee of success. The two examples I gave, McGonigle and Wetherholt, have both had great success without elite bat speed, sitting right around league average in the metric. But as indicators go, it can be a useful one. As we can see from the top end of this chart, bat speed can give you a strong platform to build on.

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Every off-season, we hear about pitchers tinkering with their pitch mix, whether that’s simply trying a new grip shown by a teammate, reimplementing old pitches, or reshaping their arsenal. It is always interesting to track new pitching trends to see what sticks in a given season. So I wanted to look at a few pitchers who have made meaningful changes to their arsenal so far in 2026, and how it has impacted their value moving forward.

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Moving on from looking at players who potentially might run out of luck in the previous piece, we now look to the other end of the chart, and some hitters who may be due some good fortune.

While identifying the hitters I thought had potential regression was easy, with plenty of highly-rostered bats in the top region of the chart with interesting data as to why they were outperforming their xwOBA in terms of BABIP, finding who to highlight at the other end was more challenging.

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At this stage of the season, the impact of luck, or lack thereof, starts to take form and become a meaningful predictor for the rest of the year.

But BABIP can be a noisy stat in isolation. I wanted to identify which hitters were getting lucky when putting balls in play, but also wanted to add a layer that allows us to assess that luck relative to fantasy value and overall offensive production.

The idea for this piece actually came from a curiosity around one specific hitter, which I will come to later, but it is a useful exercise to get a broader sense of the BABIP landscape as we enter the summer months.

So which hitters are potentially providing an unsustainable output, and which could be worth buying low on or holding onto?

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Have you ever looked at art that changed based on the direction you’re viewing it? Or maybe stared at that famous drawing of a duck for 10 minutes, only to have it morph permanently into a rabbit? The notion that one thing can be two or more does a number on our brains sometimes.

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Some teams would call it an embarrassment of riches, but the rise of Emerson Hancock in the absence of Bryce Miller early in the season has left the Mariners in a bit of a bind from a roster construction point of view.

With not enough starts to go around for six starters, Jerry Dipoto, Dan Wilson, and company opted to piggyback Bryce Miller and Luis Castillo. While the results spoke for themselves, it certainly did not look great off the field.

Whether that be Castillo launching his glove and jacket into the benches of Sutter Health Stadium, or Miller himself, very uncharacteristically for a starting pitcher, giving his thoughts rather candidly on the situation.

“This setup is not very comfortable.”

He stated awkwardly, in his post-game interview in Sacramento, before reverting to the usual newspeak we have come to expect from MLB players.

For both Castillo and Miller, there is only one way to remove yourself from any ideas of future piggybacking: pitch so well they don’t remove you.

That is exactly what Miller (and Castillo to a lesser extent, to his credit) has done, so far, since Operation Piggyback began.

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Now that the foundations have been laid and the methodology explained in Part 1 of this series, we can dive deeper into some of these pitchers.

As noted in the previous piece, Corbin Young wrote two breakdowns of individual rookie starters that I will link below:

The first covering Nolan McLean, Bubba Chandler, and Parker Messick. Link here.

The second covering Payton Tolle, Connelly Early, Brandon Sproat, and Trey Yesavage. Link here.

So this will be more of a collective analysis of the rough groupings and what stands out from the composite rating, and whether any deeper stats can further support or provide additional context for fantasy purposes.

The composite z-score rating has provided a solid framework for assessing this group of rookies, and most have now logged enough innings to draw early conclusions from the metrics. It is these pitchers who will receive the bulk of the analysis in this piece, while Gage Jump has looked enticing in his two starts — 12 innings is not quite enough for meaningful metric analysis just yet, but well worth keeping a close eye on.

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