Pairing Home Runs and High Average Hitters

Chardonnay and seafood, pinot noir and earthy flavors, home run hitters, and high average hitters. These are all great pairings. Balance is the key. While my personal strategy seeks to grab players that are multifaceted, there are times when you look up and all of those players are gone and you need to adjust. So, here is a fully yelp-reviewed menu of excellent pairings to peruse before your upcoming draft. You may choose one player in the top left of the visual and one player in the bottom right. I’m sorry, the chef will not be making any special orders tonight. Please choose only two. For this exercise, I used the following query from ATC’s top 200 offensive player projections:

HR>25 & AVG<.240

OR

HR<10 & AVG>.270

Scatter plot - high avg. vs. power

Luis Arraez projects to hit a clean .300 with only 5 home runs. Joey Gallo projects to hit .209 with 38 home runs. Together these players produce a projected .254 average with a total of 43 home runs. That’s like Pete Alonso (.258, 40) or Matt Olson (.256, 38). But if you pass over those single-player ADPs (46.1 Alonso, 41.6 Olson) you could zig while others zag and pick up the Arraez/Gallo combo much later (317.8 Arraez, 172.8 Gallo)

Let’s do another, let’s do another! David Fletcher seems to be totally off everyone’s radar. But he’s still very much a rosterable player with an auction calculator (default settings) value at $2.9 and he’s projected for 618 PAs! If you can get him (hopefully for a $1, try to get him for a $1) and, let’s say, Adolis García, you get a single player with an average/HR combo of .251/30. That’s like Tyler O’Neill (.256/31) whose ADP is currently at 46.7. But, you could employ this strategy and get Fletcher at ADP 377 and  García at 165.1. You might think O’Neill offers more in the way of stolen bases with 13 projected, but the Fletcher/García combo is projected to return 24 stolen bases (12 each).

This strategy works well in auction leagues where you hope to get $1 players no one else is interested in or in a turning spot like the 1, 10, 12, or 15 spots. This way you can employ the pocket aces strategy, or in some recent cases, pocket closers strategy without worrying about missing offensive opportunities completely. In a recent Ottoneu draft, I got David Fletcher and Paul DeJong for $1 and was happy. Like lamb and tuna fish, these two players pair nicely together. Even better, the meal was cheap.

 





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LightenUpFGmember
2 years ago

I like this strategy, as it employs the slap hitters that help a MLB team out, but the only issue I see is that by taking on two players one has to take up two roster spots. I suppose if one didn’t have much faith in filling that second roster spot with someone adequate it might as well be a Arraez or Fletcher type such that he’s not harmful to the numbers. However, this situation reminds me of someone like Billy Hamilton being on the roster… paired up with David Ortiz the two of them were a 40/40 juggernaut, but you still had Hamilton toiling away in other categories.

Last edited 2 years ago by LightenUpFG
nvandy89
2 years ago
Reply to  LightenUpFG

That was going to be my comment; two guys combining to compare to one is cool and all, but you also have to factor in the opportunity cost of using two roster spots. And also hope if they are bench guys you start them the right day. If you are flip flopping Garcia and Fletcher all year it is doubtful you are going to hit the one every day to maximize those HR/SB. You probably aren’t going to be benching Tyler O’Neil so are going to get all of his stats no matter what.