Hitter FB% Decliners — 8/11/20, A Review
Yesterday, I reviewed the hitters that enjoyed a fly ball rate surge early on in the season to see how they performed the rest of the way. Today, let’s review the decliners. Did they rebound back to their 2019 level or was the early season slump an indication of a season-long decreased FB%?
| Name | 2019 FB% | 2020 FB% Through 8/9 | Diff | 2020 FB% After 8/9 | FB% After 8/9 vs Through 8/9 | FB% After 8/9 vs 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yandy Diaz | 32.0% | 7.3% | -24.7% | 13.6% | 6.3% | -18.4% |
| Chris Taylor | 34.8% | 14.7% | -20.1% | 32.3% | 17.6% | -2.5% |
| Nelson Cruz | 40.2% | 22.7% | -17.5% | 33.7% | 11.0% | -6.5% |
| Yasmani Grandal | 38.0% | 20.7% | -17.3% | 48.7% | 28.0% | 10.7% |
| Eric Sogard | 42.3% | 25.8% | -16.5% | 35.3% | 9.5% | -7.0% |
| Avisail Garcia | 31.6% | 16.0% | -15.6% | 29.4% | 13.4% | -2.2% |
| Isiah Kiner-Falefa | 33.1% | 17.6% | -15.5% | 23.5% | 5.9% | -9.6% |
| Kyle Seager | 43.8% | 30.2% | -13.6% | 55.6% | 25.4% | 11.8% |
| Willson Contreras | 34.0% | 20.8% | -13.2% | 35.8% | 15.0% | 1.8% |
| DJ LeMahieu | 26.2% | 13.2% | -13.0% | 23.8% | 10.6% | -2.4% |
| Shed Long Jr. | 31.3% | 18.6% | -12.7% | 35.1% | 16.5% | 3.8% |
| Pete Alonso | 41.5% | 28.9% | -12.6% | 47.8% | 18.9% | 6.3% |
| Eduardo Escobar | 44.6% | 32.5% | -12.1% | 42.7% | 10.2% | -1.9% |
| Cesar Hernandez | 28.7% | 17.1% | -11.6% | 31.6% | 14.5% | 2.9% |
| Mike Trout | 49.2% | 38.9% | -10.3% | 54.4% | 15.5% | 5.2% |
| Jackie Bradley Jr. | 33.4% | 23.3% | -10.1% | 28.9% | 5.6% | -4.5% |
Every single one of the 16 hitters experienced at least a partial rebound in FB%. In fact, 12 of the 16 saw their FB% rebound by at least 10%. Surprisingly, seven of the 16 actually improved their FB% so much over the rest of the season, the RoS mark was actually higher than their 2019 mark! There were only five whose RoS FB% remained meaningfully below their 2019 mark (I’m considering those who lost at least 4.5% from 2019 as “meaningful”). So once again, we learn that when dealing with small samples, no matter what metric we’re looking at, odds are good the hitter ultimately reverts back to historical performance.
After a partial season power breakout in 2019, I was bullish on Yandy Díaz. While I was right in that he not only repeated his HR/FB rate spike, but actually slightly improved it, I was wrong about his ability to sustain his FB% gains. While injury limited him to just 114 at-bats and 97 balls in play, it’s hard to fluke your way into a measly 11.3% FB%. There’s no way of knowing which version of Díaz appears next year, the worm-killing extreme groundballer, or the 2019 power breakout, but it’s going to determine how much fantasy value he’ll earn. His value will either be limited to OBP and AL-Only leagues or be playable in shallow mixed leagues.
I sounded foolish when I proclaimed that we might be seeing early signs of Nelson Cruz’s age-related decline, as most of his metrics rebounded, but his FB% didn’t come all the way back. At age 40 now, do you really want to pay the going rate for a guy whose strikeout rate was the highest of his career, SwStk% the second highest, FB% the lowest, and both EV and maxEV the lowest from the data we have going back to 2015? Nobody noticed these small skill declines because he BABIP’d a ridiculous .360 and posted an insane 41% HR/FB rate. While he’s shown no signs of being human just yet, the downside risk is likely going to make him a bad buy at his cost.
Yasmani Grandal enjoyed the biggest FB% rebound after a groundball heavy start, and he was so fly ball crazy that he posted a mark nearly 11% higher than 2019 over the rest of the season. He ended up posting a full season FB% right in line with his history, which is good, because you don’t want Grandal hitting so many grounders.
Kyle Seager ended up as the second biggest FB% gainer over the rest of the season, which was enough to push him to the top of the RoS leaderboard on this list when compared to 2019. He hit a crazy 55.6% of his balls in the air after the slow fly ball start. The funny thing is, that still wasn’t enough to push his full season FB% up to a career high. That was 51.6%, set back in 2017. All those fly balls weren’t exactly the best strategy though, as his HR/FB rate fell to its lowest since 2013, and his BABIP, which has always been low, fell another notch to a new career low. I’m intrigued by the career best walk rate coupled with a career low strikeout rate though!
Willson Contreras, DJ LeMahieu, Eduardo Escobar and Cesar Hernandez ended up more or less in line with 2019 over the rest of the season.
Pete Alonso got off to an overall poor start, which included a big decline in FB%. Alonso is the epitome of the type of guy you want hitting 40% fly balls, so an early decline deservingly sounded alarm bells. But he also struggled with BABIP, and as a result, his season was underwhelming given what he did during his 2019 rookie season. Does he come at a value next season? We’ll have to see, but his price will clearly come down, making him a much better buy than he was heading into this season.
Let’s talk about Mike Trout. Early on, a lot of his underlying metrics looked very unTrout-like. On the FB% front, he ended up going crazy the rest of the way like Seager, and actually brought his season mark up well above his 2019 mark. While his walk and strikeout rates moved much closer to what we expect from Trout, he still finished with his worst walk and strikeout rates since 2015. The more important concern I raised in my initial blurb is his steals. At that time, he hadn’t attempted one yet. He ended up attempting just two all season, succeeding once. That matters, a lot, because part of what has made him such a consistent top overall pick was that he also swiped double digit bases.
Now fantasy owners will have to decide how much to pay for his consistency, safety, and high floor, because without the double digit steals, his 2021 projection is highly unlikely to result in the highest projected dollar value. It was fine to take him at the top if he remained within a couple of bucks of the highest projected value who may have been higher risk. But what if his projection results in $5 less in projected value?
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
RE: Cruz, yes, I’ll pay for the guy with a 92nd percentile xSLG, 93rd percentile barrel rate, 86th percentile xwOBA. Sure the contact issue is real, but he’s still hitting the snot out of the ball. His max exit velo is down but is still at 114 mph, which is 24th of all qualified hitters. Even with inevitable decline at some point, he’s still really good and likely goes at a DH discount depending on league format. It’s not that we were distracted because of his babip, it’s that we looked at other batted ball metrics. Claiming everybody was fooled due to babip and hr/fb% is weirdly condescending.
It would be convenient to see how these declines or gains relate to the rest of their batted ball profile. Such as did they hit line drives instead of fewer flyballs, etc. It could provide more context to their skillset shifts.
Since this year was a shortened season, I think we’re going to have to look at the season-long numbers a little differently when we evaluate this year. Saying Cruz had his lowest or highest numbers ever isn’t as meaningful when it’s basically 1/3 of a regular season. The question will become – has this guy ever done this over a 50-60 game sample before? That’s where the graphing feature on the player pages is so useful. For Cruz, his rolling 50 game FB% bottomed out at 19.0% on 9/5/20. That’;s lower than any number in the prior 4 seasons. However, back in 2015 he actually had 2 valleys that were even lower and he came back just fine.
I’m a little torn on Cruz. On the one hand I agree with the other comment that he is still putting up nearly elite numbers in so many ways. On the other hand, he’s 40 YO next year (and the oldest possible since his birthday is July 1st) with some numbers that are drifting slightly the wrong way as you noted.
Since 2014 vs ADP Cruz is far and away the most profitable hitter. I think he has shown negative value vs his ADP once, and once only, and it was barely. Second place was Eugenio Suarez, who this year showed slightly negative value due to batting average, but overall his pick didn’t kill you (50-60ish, returned top 80 hitter value). Every single year their are naysayers on Cruz, and every single year he just demolishes the ball. Year after year his adp seems low….then it creeps up towards the end of draft season when the bigger money comes in (platinum leagues, etc). For me, I would take a wait and see approach with Cruz. If his max ev is dipping a lot in spring training, or increased GB%, etc, then maybe I’d be out. It reminds me of how Ortiz was drafted late in his career as well. I do want to see where he signs. They have already said that the DH is out for the NL next year, and assuming that is correct, it limits his market significantly. And personally I love him in the Central, so many weak pitchers to face. I wouldn’t be too keen on him moving to the AL east for example. This is a roundabout way of saying you might be right on Cruz, but not necessarily for those reasons. It was a small sample size, and no one expects him to continue his season line, or else he would be going in the first round. I’d imagine he ends up going in the 50-70 range next year (despite mocks), and it would be hard to not be in at that price.
Trout on the other hand is concerning. His offense was down slightly, his defense was down a lot. He looked tired, he had bags under his eyes. Having a newborn is stressful, getting woken frequently in the night. With that said, he has slowed his running, basically stopping running over 60 game periods prior as well. However his sprint speed was down, as well as peak speed and home to first. Trout did have a larger decline in sprint speed between 2015-2016 (where he basically went from one of the fastest runner to top 20%) before gaining speed in the future. His weight seems to fluctuate substantially. I wouldn’t be shocked to see him come into spring training next year at 250, or at 220. He has played seasons at both weights before. A funny Trout story, when he was being signed one of the biggest things scouts talked about was his diet. They were concerned for his weight, and that he wasn’t projectable because he was already pretty large. While obviously it didn’t matter, some of the stories read like tall-tales. It wouldn’t be unusual to see him eat 20 hamburgers in a day, often 6-8 during lunch, then another 6-8 during dinner. And various ones during practice.
Rereading them I do not really know where I was going with either of these comments. Ugh I miss fantasy baseball.