Our quest for deep sleepers continues, and as former academics now seeking the Fantasy Baseball equivalent of tenure, we know the value of using as much of other people’s research as we can get away with.
Thus, first came Robert Arthur, an inhabitant of sabermetric Valhalla by virtue of his ability to combine meticulous and microscopic analysis of baseball stats with enjoyable prose. He demonstrated—we’re dumbing this down a bit, but it’s substantially accurate—that sluggers see fewer fastballs than other hitters. He noted that “fastball frequency normally varies according to the pop of the batter, so that when it changes, it may be indicating a change in the skill level of the same batter.”
Beloved Fangraphs editor Eno Sarris then built upon Arthur’s research. He observed, as Arthur had, that “the more we know about a player’s major-league work, the less powerful a change in fastball percentage is for prediction.” In other words, if we want to use fastball frequency to find players who might start hitting home runs in unexpected clusters, look at guys who don’t have much in the way of established performance. So Eno looked for hitters who (1) had fewer than 800 career plate appearances through the end of 2014, and (2) saw fewer fastballs in the second half of the season. This produced a list of power breakout candidates for 2015: Corey Dickerson, Rougned Odor, Kolten Wong, Nick Castellanos, Travis d’Arnaud, Scooter Gennett, Marwin Gonzalez, Mike Zunnino, Yasmani Grandal, and Jon Singleton.
As Eno points out, this is a group of striplings (average age 23). The thing about young players, though, is that they may be seeing fewer fastballs because pitchers have deduced that they can’t hit anything else, or perhaps even that they can’t hit anything else and swing promiscuously at anything-elses that aren’t in the strike zone. So, we wondered, how can we identify which hitters are true candidates for a power burst? We thought of a study of our own that we introduced in our second Fangraphs post. For those of you who haven’t been taking notes: We looked for hitters who saw fewer strikes and took fewer swings at bad pitches in the second half of the 2014 season, on the theory that this betokens increased wisdom for both the hitters in question and the pitchers who face them.
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