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Yes, the best in-season ERA estimator is strikeouts minus walks. You can use that tidbit to find a few sleepers in season, for sure.

But when you look at Matt Shoemaker and Phil Hughes right now, you realize there are perils when it comes to using the stat in the offseason. And really, you may start to see some of the limits of the stat even when it comes to in-season work.

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It can’t be easy to be the manager of a major league baseball team. True, the pay and the perks aren’t bad, and a lot of guys don’t mind the travel. But for one thing, there’s the uniform. It really serves no practical purpose, and even if you’re relatively young and relatively trim, like Kevin Cash or Joe Girardi, you’d still look better in a nice crisp Zegna. If you’re not and you’re not, you might as well be wearing a clown suit.

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Two of the younger players in the American League, Rougned Odor and Daniel Norris, were popular on draft day in many leagues, especially deeper leagues or long term leagues such as dynasty formats. In those long term leagues, injuries to players ahead of them during spring training solidified them spots out of the gate, and many – including myself – were hopeful that the youngsters would have what it took to stay both on the major league roster and productive from a fantasy perspective. I even went so far as to write up on Odor when he struggled over the first few weeks of the season, but I was unfortunately wrong on my tout.
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Today in The Freshmen Report we’re going to look at, among other things, the White Sox’s second base job and a potential heir apparent to Fernando Rodney in Seattle.

Previous Reports:
Freshmen May 4
Freshmen April 23

Kyle Lobstein, LHP, Tigers: If there is one thing the Rays know how to do it’s develop pitching. Lobstein is one of those lucky individuals, even though he was traded to the Tigers midway through that process. He’s not flashy but southpaws don’t have to light up the radar gun if they can command and control the ball. He averages just 86 mph but utilizes a four-pitch mix, including the trendy cutter. Despite his lack of velocity, Lobstein has a sturdy frame with a history of providing lots of innings — and he’s continued that in the Majors by averaging almost 6.0 innings a game. The big worry with this rookie right now is the lack of strikeouts. His rate sits at just 4.08 K/9 but he’s offset that by inducing ground balls at an above-average rate. Justin Verlander is getting closer to returning from the disabled list so Lobstein may have to shift to the bullpen in June, unless (or, perhaps, until) another injury crops up.

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When a player goes out and has themselves a truly putrid start to the season, small improvements are typically lost unless you happen to follow whatever team they play for or they exist on your fantasy baseball team. I happen to have many fantasy baseball teams, and therefore I track many players, for better or for worse. My wife thinks worse. Regardless, although your standard small sample size warning applies, I’ve gotten production out of some surprising sources recently.

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So here’s this starting pitcher who arrived in the Major Leagues in 2013 at age 23, made 10 starts, 7 of them Quality Starts, and posted the best ERA of any rookie starter in the American League. Yet he got not a single Rookie of the Year vote, and was paid no pre-season attention by the Fantasy experts in 2014—he wasn’t even taken in the 15-team, 29-round Tout Wars mixed draft. And the experts were right: he started the 2014 season 0-6 before being sent to the minors. Of course, he got no support from his hitters (12 runs in 7 starts).

But he did in fact pitch pretty badly: he’s fortunate his record wasn’t minus 1-6. But then the guy gets it together in Triple-A, comes back up for good in July, and makes 15 starts, 10 of them QS. Nonetheless, he was again almost universally ignored in drafts this year. Maybe that’s because he had a terrible spring training, though that may have been due to the injury that has kept him on the disabled list for the first month-plus of the season. But he’s finally healthy, and has made two minor-league rehab starts. Unfortunately, the first one was dismal. Fortunately, the second one was superb. Read the rest of this entry »

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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A few days back, David Appelman announced the addition of Hard Hit, Medium Hit and Soft Hit data to the batted ball stats on FanGraphs. Since then, I have been playing around with them, and found some interesting things.

But I had no idea what to make of those things. If a guy has an extremely high Hard Hit%, what does that mean? Should we expect regression? Should we expect it to continue? And what does that mean for fantasy value?

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You may have noticed that FanGraphs now feeds batted ball data, courtesy of Baseball Info Solutions, into its leaderboards. The day the data appeared, my mind buzzed with ways they could be useful in improving our understanding of a hitter’s batting average on balls in play (BABIP).

Mike Podhorzer already augmented previous attempts at devising an equation for expected batting average on balls in play (xBABIP) for hitters by incorporating elements of a hitter’s power, speed, plate discipline and batted ball tendencies. So, with fresh numbers in hand, I embarked on a journey to further improve the ever-evolving xBABIP. However, I sought to do so by using only batted ball data. Basically, I intended to develop a convenient xBABIP equation, one that can be computed using almost entirely variables found on the same page.

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More matter with less art, we hear some spoilsports telling us. We came for data; give us data. Fair enough, and here you go. The thing is, though, you never know. Sometimes you complain about the menu and you wind up with manna. Other times, you complain, and you get so much of what you’re after that, as God so trenchantly put it, “it come out of your nostrils and it be loathsome unto you.” Keep us posted as to which it is; we know you won’t be bashful about it. Read the rest of this entry »