Manifesto (With Players That Improved Their Swings)

There is a long list of things for which you will not find us useful. On that list are, among other pastimes, auto repair, ballroom dancing, cat sitting, and identifying with microscopic precision how good players whom the world already knows to be good are going to be this season. We mention this because we are starting to see articles identifying “sleepers” for the coming season, and most of the guys identified strike us as being wide awake.

For example: we like Kolten Wong a lot. Indeed, as we will come to discuss in the fullness of time, we drafted him in our slow draft. But he’s a good example of the players who are turning up on sleeper lists, when in fact he’s well known to anyone who played Fantasy Baseball or followed Reality Baseball last season.

Here’s a young, highly touted prospect with a good minor league record who’s given the starting second base job in St. Louis, craps out, is banished to Louisville, comes back refreshed, and performs well. Why wouldn’t you have him in your sights?

Assuming Wong stays healthy, he figures to hit somewhere between 10 and 20 home runs and steal somewhere between 20 and 30 bases. That’s pretty much where the stat projections we’ve seen have him. Somebody’s going to be righter about him than somebody else, but it probably won’t be us. We don’t do our own stat projections (though we do tweak and borrow eclectically from other people’s for our own purposes), and the folks who do are far more astute than we are about forecasting the performance of the Kolten Wongs of the universe.

We can’t tell you whether to take him in the fifth round, the sixth round (which is where we got him), or the seventh round. The fourth round is probably too early, because the opportunity cost (econ-geek term for the cost of an opportunity foregone) of passing up a probably-better player is too high, and if you wait until the eighth round, he won’t be there, but you don’t need us to tell you that.

No, what we’re hoping to do is call your attention to players who, if not precisely sleepers, are at least dozing lightly. We’re trying to identify, for ourselves and for you, guys in the lower-to-mid tiers of players who seem to us notably underappreciated, underanalyzed, and undervalued. We’re also looking for players with signficant “forecast uncertainty” (i.e. we’re all clueless about them). Most will be guys towards whom our speluniking in sunless statistical caverns have led us, though some will have been revealed to us in a dream. And then there are the opposites of sleepers—the insomniacs—who seem to us so grossly overvalued as to require comment.

To show you where we’ve gone, we first invoke (and highly recommend) Jeff Zimmerman’s superb Fangraphs three-part draft-prep series. After a series of arduous and useful calculations, he concludes that the very last (“replacement level”) hitter he’d draft in a 15-team league with 14 hitters per team is Ender Inciarte.

But we think Inciarte offers real value, and has a good chance to wind up as a top-50 outfielder this season. Don’t trust us; trust the pitchers who have to throw baseballs in his direction. It’s said, and it seems logical, that as a hitter improves, pitchers are less likely to challenge him with pitches in the strike zone.

So what we went looking for were hitters who (1) saw fewer strike-zone pitches in the second half of last season than the first, betokening a new respect from the mound (in other words, their “zone percentage” decreased), but (2) chased fewer pitches that were outside the strike zone (in other words, their “O-swing percentage” decreased), suggesting that they had recently solved some conundrum at the plate. We then looked within this group to find players whose wOBA increased in the second half, meaning that pitchers had reason to be more wary of them.

And there we found, among others, everyone’s favorite replacement player, Ender Inciarte. The top 20 and bottom 20 players are below, and we’ll say more about this approach next time. But let’s stay with Inciarte for a moment. We looked closely at him and found that his batted-ball profile suggests there will be an improvement in batting average on balls in play, which should help his batting average. Moreover, he batted leadoff in every game he started for the D-Backs last season, even after A.J. Pollock returned. With a healthy Paul Goldschmidt, a healthy Trumbo, and new, exorbitantly expensive Cuban import Yasmany Tomas batting behind him, he should score a lot of runs. Plus, he’s very fast (19 stolen bases and only three caught stealings last year, 43 SB in the minors the year before). With regular playing time and green lights, he could get 25 or 30 SBs. Inciarte’s playing time is uncertain, but evidently Tomas, an outfielder last year, is slotted for third base. Factor in the D-Backs’ annual pestilence of injuries, and this apparent fourth (or maybe fifth) outfielder could be extremely useful to both his Reality and his Fantasy teams.

Please don’t run away with the idea that we’re convinced Inciarte will star this season. What we think is that no one’s paying attention to him, that he’ll be cheap, and that we’d much rather have him than a lot of guys (Rajai Davis, Alejandro de Aza, even Lorenzo Cain) who figure to be drafted before or cost more than he is or does. In other words, a sleeper. See you next time. Meanwhile, for further study and explication:

PLAYERS WHO TAKE BETTER (OR WORSE) SWINGS AT WORSE (OR BETTER) PITCHES

TOP 20 -Name	O-Swing Change	Z-Change	BOTTOM 20 -Name	O-Swing Change	Z-Change
Justin Turner	-1.40%	-4.40%	Jackie Bradley Jr.	7.70%	2.80%
Eric Sogard	-4.80%	-4.70%	Derek Norris	5.40%	1.10%
Gregor Blanco	-1.00%	-3.80%	Scooter Gennett	4.50%	3.50%
Jayson Werth	-4.40%	-6.90%	Salvador Perez	11.10%	0.70%
Jon Jay	-4.30%	-3.50%	Matt Dominguez	6.70%	0.50%
Jean Segura	-3.00%	-6.10%	Gordon Beckham	7.10%	3.10%
Jordy Mercer	-4.20%	-4.90%	Charlie Blackmon	5.30%	2.20%
Stephen Drew	-1.90%	-4.20%	Dee Gordon	6.30%	2.20%
Grady Sizemore	-1.90%	-3.80%	Wilson Ramos	14.50%	0.40%
Peter Bourjos	-8.20%	-7.30%	Ichiro Suzuki	7.20%	1.00%
Aaron Hill	-8.30%	-3.20%	Adam Lind	6.20%	1.50%
Neil Walker	-2.50%	-3.30%	Anthony Gose	4.60%	2.50%
J.J. Hardy	-2.10%	-5.40%	Jose Reyes	4.50%	1.00%
Tyler Flowers	-0.60%	-4.00%	Dexter Fowler	5.00%	0.70%
Jedd Gyorko	-0.50%	-4.10%	Lonnie Chisenhall	2.70%	3.20%
Ender Inciarte	-4.40%	-1.60%	Alex Rios	2.70%	0.50%
Buster Posey	0.70%	-3.20%	Seth Smith	2.00%	3.00%
Rickie Weeks	-0.90%	-1.90%	Eduardo Nunez	2.50%	3.10%
Adrian Gonzalez	1.30%	-4.00%	Josh Hamilton	2.60%	1.80%
Brad Miller	-5.80%	-1.90%	Jay Bruce	5.50%	-0.30%

All “Top 20” had increased wOBA and are listed from largest to smallest increase in wOBA; All “Bottom 20” had decreased wOBA and are listed from largest to smallest decrease in wOBA