Peaks and Valleys: A Tale of Two wOBA Graphs

The year was 2023, the MLB season was ending, and Elehuris Montero was on a tear:

In the season’s final months (Sept/Oct), Montero was slashing .286/.355/.531. In that same period, his BABIP was inflated, his K% was extra-large (29.1%), and 17 out of the 27 games he played in were at home at Coors Field. Even still, when the season came to its conclusion, a just turned 25-year-old Montero had improved upon his hard hit rate, he had great eyes for a fastball and it seemed he might take a step forward in 2024. No, he likely wouldn’t be an All-Star or a top-tier fantasy player, but could he hit somewhere shy of 20 homers in 2024? He had just hit 11 in only 85 games and now projection systems had his 2024 home run total anywhere between 10 to 20 home runs, so why not? When I ran ATC’s 2024 projections through the auction calculator to help me update my preseason third base ranks, Montero popped. He hadn’t cracked the top 40 third basemen previously, but previously I had been using Steamer’s projection system. So, I brought him up into the top 47 and wrote:

In 2022 and 2023, Montero out-slugged the league average. Sure, he only played in a combined 138 games and yes, his expected slugging was well below his actual in both seasons, but he does play in Colorado. He combined for 17 home runs between the two seasons and now, he’s being projected for another 17 in 2024 along with a .448 slugging percentage.

It’s never cool to quote your own writing, but I just did and therefore, am-not-cool. I’ll quote another fantasy analyst who was pro-Montero in the spring of 24′, Chad Young:

Montero is something of a fun power prospect…Coors is a special place and when he is in that special place, Montero strikes out a lot less (28.4% vs. 44.%), walks more (6.8% vs. 2.8%), hits for a lot more power (21.2% HR/FB rate and .231 ISO vs. 12.1% and .131), and generally goes from well below replacement level (.226 wOBA) to a star (.379 wOBA).

The truth is, neither of us was totally bought in. I don’t imagine any fantasy player was. Chad was writing about his willingness to throw $1 on a player and I had him at #41 among eligible third basemen. Both of us tampered our expectations. Chad wrote:

He’s got a short track record, and there are a lot of possible outcomes here, including a drop in home BABIP (.396) that craters his home value.

and I wrote:

With strikeout rates in the 30s and apparent issues hitting anything besides a fastball, Montero ranks in the bottom of the “Call Maybes” bucket.

While projection systems had a range of predicted outcomes, the helpful InterSk measurement attached to Ariel Cohen’s ATC projections was a really high +1.9. ATC utilizes a “wisdom of the crowd” approach and InterSk provides an explainer for each player that other projection systems can’t offer. It measures the skewness of a player’s projection. A negative skew has their value being brought down by one outlier projection. That’s helpful to pay attention to because the majority of projections agree on the high end of a player’s possible outcomes, a sign of confidence. But, the opposite happens to a player with a positive InterSk. This means a bullish projection is bringing the ATC projection up somewhat, a signal of warning. In the case of Montero, the high-end power projection brought his ATC projection up slightly. Regardless of the projection system you used, on Montero, there wasn’t much consensus.

In the end, Montero did not pan out in 2024. He made the big league club out of spring training and was designated for assignment before July. His 67-game slash line ended at .205/.267/.304, he only hit four home runs and his wOBA sat at .254:

I could try to ramp up the drama at this point, but that would be too much work. There’s no drama in cutting at $1 player. You could have picked up Michael Toglia, Montero’s replacement at 1B, and you would have gained 25 home runs in the process. There’s no drama in missing on a player you were already “iffy” about. But if you picked him over the player I had ranked just below him, José Caballero, you missed out on 44 stolen bases. That may have ended up being a fairly costly decision.

Now, keep that costly decision in mind as we glance at Josh Smith’s wOBA chart:

Smith’s 2023 Sept/Oct slash line was a miserable .128/.250/.340. It was his worst month by far, and he ended the season with nearly everything on a downward trajectory. He wasn’t grabbing anyone’s attention going into 2024. The last we had heard of Smith in the offseason was in a Jeff Zimmerman mid-September lineup analysis where he wrote:

Josh H. Smith (vs RHP) and Jonathan Ornelas (vs LHP) are in a third-base platoon.

He was nowhere to be found in my third base ranks and he didn’t touch Paul Sporer’s 2024 Shortstop ranks. Now, turn the clock to the early 2024 season, the same time Elehuris Montero is headed to the minor leagues, and Josh Smith is slashing .290/.384/.451 with seven home runs and four stolen bases. Smith’s playing time was suddenly steady as teammates like Josh Jung, and Evan Carter were injured. Smith ended the season with a .258/.337/.394 slash line, but there were a few moments where he looked like a breakout player:

Yet, things were happening around that game 74 peak that made us hesitant. Matt Martel’s late June analysis commended Smith for the damage he’d done to fastballs but pointed out:

There are some questions about the sustainability of Smith’s breakout. He is greatly outperforming his expected stats (.244 xBA, .350 xSLG, .314 xwOBA), and it seems unlikely that pitchers will keep grooving him this many pitches.

As you can see from the 2024 rolling wOBA chart above, Smith didn’t keep it going throughout the whole season and had the scales of luck and justice tip back in the opposite direction. Here is his 2024 BABIP by month:

Mar/Apr .369 -> May .309 -> June .361 -> July .296 -> August .268 -> September .274

Again, his 2024 end-of-season stats look decent and his career wOBA chart progressed in the way we thought Elehuris Montero’s might:

So let us now take stock on what happened in 2024 for these two players to understand better how things went unexpectedly well for one player (Josh Smith) and how things went unexpectedly bad for another. I think it’s fair to use the term “unexpectedly bad” for Montero given the drastic downward slope his wOBA took from 2023 to 2024. Again, we didn’t expect him to be great, but multiple pieces of evidence suggested fantasy relevance.

In conclusion, Josh Smith and Elehuris Montero were two fringe-level fantasy players heading into 2024, with more attention being paid to Montero. Both players’ wOBA had climbed in the two seasons before the 2024 season. Montero had the promise of power, supported by projection systems built on playing time predictions. Once Montero fell well below replacement level, the Rockies acted and replaced him. Josh Smith had something of the opposite happen to him. He wasn’t expected to play, wasn’t expected to hit, but injury, hard work, and probably some good fortune placed him in the lineup nearly every day. He had luck on his side in more ways than one and became a solid fantasy contributor for about a month or two.

The key here is that projecting a player’s full season is very difficult. As we all sit around and take in full-year projections and talk ourselves into drafting a player we think is a “sleeper”, we must take caution and consider full seasons are 162 games and a lot can happen in that time. There will be players that were not on our radar. There will be players we miss on, and that my friends, is the fun part. Remember, this is meant to be fun. You remember fun, right? Let these two players be a lesson that by their very nature sleepers rarely pan out, that drafting players with projection consensus and long track records minimizes risk, and that even Coors Field can’t help you hit a breaking ball.