Introducing StatCast/xStats Week(s) at RotoGraphs

From now until some point before the season starts, the focus of most RotoGraph articles will be on getting the most useful information out of the StatCast information. It’ll include as many or as few of articles to create a good understanding of the data. With tons of available information much has been written about the subject especially here at RotoGraphs. The key with this series is to cut through all the different data points (e.g. launch angle, spin rate, sprint speed) and how they measured (e.g. max, average, weighted) to find which values to focus on and which ones to ignore.

The point of this article is to provide an initial forum, via the comments, to collect and try to answer the question with any previous research. There is no need to completely recreate everything.

Starting off, here are the very best articles I could find on various StatCast subjects. I’m 100% sure I missed better articles on making StatCast information usable for fantasy owners. Let me know in the comments of any articles I should add (they don’t have to be from a FanGraphs website, it just happens Andrew Perpetua writes here and run the website xStats.org).

Overall hitting article

• xStats and Fantasy Uses for Statcast by Andrew Perpetua

Three articles on converting StatCast data to fantasy stats.

• Introducing xFantasy: Translating Hitters’ xStats to Fantasy by Ryan Brock
• xFantasy, Part II: Triple Slash Converter by Ryan Brock
• xFantasy, Part III: Can xStats Beat the Projections? by Ryan Brock

Sprint speed

• Diving into Statcast Sprint Speed by Mike Podhorzer

Pitch Spin Rate

• Spin Rates, Swinging Strikes, and an xSwStrk Stat. by Andrew Perpetua

As a group, we’ll be head deep in the subject so it’ll a perfect time to ask questions and hopefully, they can get answered. One article, I’m for sure writing is finding which stats on the Baseball Savant dashboard are useful and which ones aren’t. Many more are planned. Please ask away now. Thanks.