Archive for Stat Breakdown

This crop of rookies has now had some time to get adjusted to the big leagues, and this piece will look to check in on how they have measured up so far through the season. Less of a prediction of things to come, but more so of how much we can rely on them at this stage of their young careers. But of course, this is fantasy. So there will be a natural eye on what could be… are some guys getting the rough end of the stick, and are some getting away with it a little?

Corbin Young recently wrote a fantastic check-in piece that went into depth on some rookie pitchers, Nolan McLean, Parker Messick, and Bubba Chandler. While this won’t go into as much of the nitty-gritty, it is a more macro exercise analysing how they stack up against each other as a whole.

I wanted to establish a composite rating that accounted for metrics that provided a balanced view of their profile as a pitcher, balanced against their xERA. These metrics were then weighted to favor those I felt were more important and those I want to see in a pitcher. This will be split into two pieces: this one sets up the methodology, so to speak, and the reasoning behind the metrics used for the ranking. The next piece will dive into more of the nuances and any interesting cases the data throws up.

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Since 2021, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has been one of the best hitters in the league. As we enter June, he has just three home runs and his worst power numbers for several years. At this pace, he will finish with nine homers — the same as he managed in the shortened 60-game season in 2020. His top-20 average ADP has resulted in returns that barely put him in the top 20 at first base, and that poses the question: Can this regression be explained?

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If you want to get a hit, trying to square up the ball is a great place to start. But not all squared up hits are created equal. Squaring up your grounders and line drives will likely help your batting average, but won’t do much in the home run department. Squaring up your flyballs, especially at the ideal launch angle, should help get the ball out of the yard.

If you look at the surface level Savant lollipops, you will see a “Squared-Up%” metric, which is represented on FanGraphs by “SqUpCon%”. This describes a batted ball event where at least 80% of the possible exit velocity on a pitch was obtained, given the swing and pitch characteristics, which typically means a ball that was hit on the sweet spot of the bat, according to Statcast.

As explored by Fangraphs’ Davy Andrews, even before we look at the launch angle of a squared up ball, we should acknowledge that not all of these swings result in a ball that’s hit even remotely hard, because a ridiculously slow swing that hits the ball on the barrel can still technically be squared up by the Statcast definition. But for the most part, hitters are swinging relatively hard. And we have ways to see just how fast they swing and how often they unleash their fast swings now, thanks again to Statcast. 

With all of this in mind, check out the Fangraphs Squared-Up Explorer. This tool helps you see how often a hitter is squaring up the ball at different launch angles, highlighting the ideal launch angle for home runs and visualizing a given hitter’s profile compared to league average. 

Using this tool, you can compare a given hitter’s profile against other hitters and during different periods of time. You can compare Gunnar Henderson’s hot start in 2024 to his 2025 and to his start to this season, as I did last week. 

Today, I’ll run through a few examples that demonstrate the possible ways to use the Squared-Up Explorer and try to show you that you can and should use this tool yourself as a starting point for analyzing hitters, whether it be struggling bats you may want to cut or hot streak hitters you’re looking for an excuse to believe in. For the hitters I look into, I’ll provide some recommendations, but really want to invite you to use this exceptionally user-friendly tool yourself. 

Let’s start with a particularly frustrating hitter, Fernando Tatis Jr. 

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Beyond the Obvious Multi-Fastball Breakouts

Building on the chart we used last week to identify multi-fastball starters, some interesting names did not receive the analysis they perhaps deserved. This second piece seeks to address that, diving deeper into the names that did not fit the profiles identified in the initial piece but deserve coverage nonetheless, both from a pure baseball and fantasy perspective. Of the 38 qualified starters using a multi-fastball approach, 24 utilize a true multi-variant arsenal. The majority of these pitchers are already well known. Deep dives on Bryan Woo or Max Fried are not necessary at this point, but having covered some of the more obvious fantasy adds in part one, there was still plenty more to explore. The updated chart below reflects the latest qualified starter data, including some new names worth keeping an eye on.

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Should you still trust pitching projections in the final month of the season? Or is it enough to just look at how a player has performed this year? This article explores some strategies for how to better project September pitching performances. Read the rest of this entry »

How can Statcast improve hitting prospect valuations? This article examines the predictive power of prominent Statcast metrics at the Triple-A level.

With Statcast data now publicly available for every Triple-A game since 2023, I wanted to look at how much it helps us evaluate hitting prospects compared to more traditional data. Specifically, this article considers how well several Triple-A metrics from the full 2023 season — wOBAcon (wOBA on contact), xwOBAcon, barrel rate per batted ball event, and 90th percentile exit velocity — predict MLB wOBAcon in 2024 (MLB wOBAcon through the games of July 26th, as I have been working on this piece for a little while now).

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This article takes a look at some of the new bat tracking metrics published this week at Baseball Savant. It aims to help readers incorporate the new metrics into their analysis toolkit.

Bat tracking metrics have now been published for 2024, starting on April 3^rd. Last year, Baseball America published a test version of average bat speed as well. The operationalization of the bat tracking metrics has been tweaked since the Baseball America version was published, but so far, this is the data we have to work with.

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This article ranks the game’s top projected hitting prospects by peak wRC+ heading into 2024 (it does not incorporate any 2024 data). It is a counterpart to this February piece on baseball’s top projected pitching prospects. I only just got done with my offseason methodological updates for hitters–please forgive me for publishing this one week into the season!

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HRs dropped by 729 to 5215, a 12% decline from 2021.

The league SLG fell to .395, the first time below .400 since 2014.

Aaron Judge led the league with 62 HRs, easily outpacing the NL leader, Kyle Schwarber, and his 46.

Two other players hit 40+ with Mike Trout and Pete Alonso (40 each) joining Judge and Schwarber, giving us four hitters with 40+ HRs, down from the five in 2021.

Six players hit 35-39: Austin Riley (38), Yordan Alvarez (37), Christian Walker (36), Paul Goldschmidt (35), Mookie Betts (35), Rowdy Tellez (35). Down from 14 in 2021.

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