Just A Spring Fling? Take Caution Before Falling In Love With These Spring Time Mashers

There are a few players who are showing off this spring. First, the Orioles need to make room for Colton Cowser. This dude is slashing .478/.586/1.000 with four home runs and a spring training leading (qualified hitters) wRC+ of 307. How about Miguel Andujar? He has also hit four home runs and has 13 hits in 32 at-bats, good for a .406 batting average. Unlike most of the hitters who have high batting averages this spring, Oneil Cruz has a very low BABIP, .182. That, compared to Cowser’s .583 BABIP is night and day different. Yet, Cruz is still hitting for a very impressive slash line of .300/.440/.900.

What can we surmise from spring training data? I’m not sure, to be honest, and this post is not an attempt to measure how predictive spring training stats are of regular season performance. Last year, Sam Wirth posted his research on that topic to Prospects Live, a worthwhile read. But I am here to warn you about being drawn to players who are making a splash during spring training in your upcoming drafts. Remember how hot Trea Turner’s bat was in the 2023 World Baseball Classic? Turner slashed .391/.440/1.043 and hit five home runs during the tournament. However, those who rostered Turner will remember that his first-half MLB performance did not mimic that of his WBC showing. Turner slashed .247/.299/.389 in the first half of the season following the WBC.

None of this is meant to skew you away from players that are performing well this spring. The table below shows the top pre-season performers by wRC+, some of whom absolutely should be drafted right away:

Anthony Rizzo, Zack Gelof, Oneil Cruz, and Ketel Marte are all players on fantasy draft boards, but Aramis Garcia? He’ll need to outcompete J.T. Realmuto and Garrett Stubbs if he’s going to play in the major leagues. Miguel Andujar is likely on the weak side of a platoon and Forrest Wall will have a hard time finding space in the Braves outfield. But names like Aaron Hicks, Angel Martínez, and Colton Cowser should be filed away for when the deep, deep depths of fantasy rosters need filling. How many of these players will stay hot and force their managers to find playing time for them and how many will be riding the minor league buses all over our beautiful country?

To help answer this, let’s take a look at a similar group of players from last season’s spring training. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison. This group’s data reflects a full spring training whereas the group above still has a few weeks to play. In addition, last season’s World Baseball Classic removed a lot of excellent players from the spring training pool. It shouldn’t completely discount the analysis, but it should be taken into consideration. Here are the top 10 wRC+ (qualified) performers from last spring:

Now, I’ll bring in three separate stats to this dataset and make comparisons between spring training, the first half of the MLB season that followed, and end-of-year stats. Let’s start with batting average:

Any empty cell in the table translates to players who did not appear in the major leagues during that time. Orioles prospect Heston Kjerstad had a great spring but was sent to the minor leagues in 2023 and did not get a call-up to the majors until the end of the 2023 season. It’s no secret that batting averages can be inflated during the spring, but not one of these players came close to matching their spring batting average in the first month of the season. If you’re hoping that a player whose bat is scorching hot in spring continues that momentum into the first month of the season, it’s unlikely. Let’s move on to wOBA:

Changing the statistic doesn’t change the story. In 2023, the full-season league average wOBA was .318. Players like Matt Olson and Julio Rodríguez aren’t the players this post is written for and you wouldn’t win an award for projecting those players to finish above average. But, if you saw spring 2023 Jake Cave and pushed him up your leaderboard you were falling victim to the recency bias that comes with seeing baseball for the first time all winter. Cave never got the playing time he needed and finished the year with a .212/.272/.348 slash line. Seen enough tables? Here’s a bar chart of how those hitters who qualified during spring training performed on average through the spring, the first half, and the full season:

The chart shows just how inflated spring-time hitter stats are and how much more indicative first-half stats can be of a full season when compared to spring performances. Colton Cowser will be a good player, but it’s going to take some time to get there. For starters, he’s got three and possibly four (Cedric Mullins, Anthony Santander, Austin Hays, Ryan O’Hearn) established players blocking his path to playing time. Practicing a little restraint when it comes to bidding for Cowser in 2024 fantasy leagues will be a good thing. Don’t let the fact that you, for the first time ever, have watched a lot of spring training games on MLB.TV, skew your understanding of a player’s full-season potential. As draft day comes near, add a little water to spring-time stats and dilute them for 2024 expectations.