With a third of the season in the books, the sample size for certain data and metrics has grown from too small to large enough that it must be taken seriously. The New York Yankees post a wRC+ of 123 against left-handed pitching — the best mark in baseball. The Mariners, another pre-season World Series contender, sit at 75. That 48-point gap between the two elite lineups on paper, against southpaws, is no longer such a small sample that we need to ignore it. Leveraging platoons has long been an important strategic lever for lineups looking to gain an advantage. Using wRC+ through the first stretch of the 2026 season, we can see every team’s offensive production against left- and right-handed pitching to find where the real discrepancies lie, and how we can target these matchups on both sides of the ball as we move deeper into the season, and what trends we should be watching.
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.
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.
Before I get into analyzing what I think may be a relatively broken hitter, I have something to admit. This admission may sound familiar to you. Especially if you are at all impulsive. Or love to trade.
A few weeks back, after trading Corey Seager for Dylan Cease in what felt like an absolute coup, I got a bit ahead of my skis. Without looking at a single Fangraphs or Baseball Savant page, I fired an offer into the ether. I dealt away Michael King, Cade Cavalli, and Bo Bichette for Gunnar Henderson, in what felt like a classic buy low-sell high, where Henderson represented the low and King the high.
The point of this article is not to discuss King’s less than rosy peripherals. Nor is it to shame me for dealing Bichette before he seemingly started heating up. It is, at least in part, a cautionary tale, though I’d say it’s a hopeful one.
It’s nearly the end of May. Roughly one third of the way through the regular season. Already, we’ve had our fair share of surprises. New main characters are scattered across your league, or all concentrated on the roster of a sure to be smug top seed.
Whether it’s the manager who added Davis Martin early or the one who was utterly convinced by Jordan Walker and his offseason with Driveline, they’re certainly sitting pretty so far.
For every one of those managers, there’s the one who missed out on Corey Seager in the draft, bought low on the veteran slugger, watched him go hitless in the seven games after trading for him, begged for him to hit the phantom IL, and then knowingly grimaced while moving him to the actual IL at the end of last week due to back tightness.
Some like it hot. And the A’s are certainly some. Since their move to West Sacramento, A’s hitters have finally been treated to a friendly home park. But that park is much friendlier when the weather warms up.
Mapping the A’s Bats by Month at Home (2025)
Month
HR
FB%
HR/FB
ISO
wRC+
Mar/April
16
36.7%
11.0%
.159
96
May
15
35.7%
11.5%
.151
118
June
14
35.5%
11.6%
.147
99
July
23
39.3%
20.2%
.241
116
August
20
36.0%
14.2%
.183
107
Sept/Oct
17
36.1%
16.2%
191
108
In this case, timing is a proxy for expected weather. Put simply, since we expect it to be hotter in the summer, especially in Sacramento, we expect offense to increase as the hitting environment becomes more favorable.
They make us feel like gods. Those pitchers who begin the season on the fringe of being rostered who you stream against a weak offense to begin the season, who then go on to give you five innings with a handful of strikeouts and a win.
In this throw away culture where newer is always better, it’s easy to lose sight of the essentials. And that’s especially true when “newer” means throwing three different fastballs over 97 mph or uncorking splitters that are hurled so fast they necessitate a new name.
That presents an opportunity. To zig where the market is zagging today is to not cast aside the command artists as flukes, but instead to let results come before the flashiest of underlying numbers. If the K-BB% isn’t convincing and the Stuff+ is lacking, there is still a path to success, and to surplus value via waiver wire adds and trades.
