How A Rolling Chart Can Help Explain Your Season

The month of June was an interesting time for the playoff-bound Orioles. When the month concluded, two of their brightest stars, Adley Rutschman and Anthony Santander, had wRC+ marks below 100 for the month. But the story of the Orioles in 2023 isn’t isolated to a few stars. In fact, it’s the opposite. The story of the Orioles 2023 regular season, is a combination of stories from rookies, to established everyday contributors, to veterans who all performed well at various points in the season. When one player was off, another one came out of nowhere to lift the team. Interact with the graph below by clicking on each player’s name to turn their data on and off and visualize the O’s wRC+ production in June:

When Rutschman and Santander were down, Aaron Hicks, Ryan O’Hearn, and Gunnar Henderson picked them up. Of course, Santander was pretty darn good for most of the month, hovering above the league average 100 mark, but a costly slump period brought his June aggregate numbers down and the team needed to step in to help out. There were many stories like this throughout the major leagues this season. Players slumped, players surged, and this big blue marble we call planet Earth just kept on spinning.

Players can sneakily fly under that 100 line for long periods of time without being pulled from fantasy baseball rosters. Most sites are generally showing us game logs and stat accumulations. But, wouldn’t it be useful to have a visual like this? Let’s put together a fake but realistic fantasy team, isolate the data down to a month-long time period, and then make some decisions. Since wRC+ doesn’t always help fantasy managers, I’m going to switch over to wOBA because I think it’s a better metric to make in-season fantasy adjustments with. Here’s our team:

C – Will Smith
1B – José Abreu
2B – Gleyber Torres
3B – Alex Bregman
IF – Ty France
OF – Bryan Reynolds
OF – Giancarlo Stanton
OF – Corbin Carroll
OF – Christopher Morel
UTIL – Josh Bell

Click on Giancarlo Stanton’s name and you’ll see that, especially towards the end of June, our team would have been better off replacing or benching him. The visual leaves some to be desired. I need to add an average line. However, the interactive nature is very useful. For example, isolate the chart to just the outfielders and you can see that Carroll started to come back down to earth at the end of the month while Morel held steady and Stanton showed some hope of turning things around. Without digging into the rolling chart, some may have been swayed to bring Stanton back into the lineup when he hit a home run on the 29th of June. But, this chart tells us that sticking with Morel and Carroll (while keeping a close eye on Carroll) and adding two outfielders to pick up the slack due to the Reynolds injury and the Stanton slump would be the best course of action. With that in mind, we can bring available outfielders into the visual to see who fits nicely. At the end of June, Chad Young’s Ottoneu Hot Right Now listed Tommy Pham, Jake McCarthy, and Ryan O’Hearn as players hot to trot. Let’s see how they interact with our theoretical roster in June:

In the visual, click on and remove Stanton, and your team looks like it is righting the ship with the addition of Pham, McCarthy, and O’Hearn. Can’t have them all? Isolate the chart down to just those three outfielders to make a wise decision on which two you want to add.

Yes, this could have been useful yesterday, but next season is right around the corner, isn’t it? One of my off-season goals is to create an explainer on how you can make these visuals on your own. Stay tuned!