Archive for Manuel Margot

A hitter doesn’t have to be selective in order to produce, but it certainly helps. Alex Bregman, Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, George Springer, Marcus Semien and Anthony Rendon were all among the top 10 percent of qualified hitters in terms of O-Swing% this season. In other words, they were among the choosiest hitters, swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone at exceedingly low rates.

Eddie Rosario, Tim Anderson, Javier Báez, Jeff McNeil, Nicholas Castellanos, Eduardo Escobar and Rafael Devers were in the bottom 10 percent for O-Swing%, proving that you can still be valuable in fantasy (and in real, actual baseball) without having even decent plate discipline. Some members of this group are simply good bad-ball hitters. Rosario, McNeil, Escobar and Devers were well above average at making contact with out-of-zone pitches. McNeil also made relatively high-quality contact on those offerings, posting an xwOBA (.314) that was 16 points above the average on out-of-zone pitches for hitters who saw at least 1,000 pitches this season.
Read the rest of this entry »

By this time next week, several teams in the National League will probably have lineups with a different look. For now, managers are mostly tinkering on the margins. Still, there are a few players who have recently seen their playing time take a turn for the better or the worse.

Arizona

David Peralta made his return to the Diamondbacks on Wednesday after missing three weeks with a shoulder injury. He pinch-hit on Wednesday, but on Friday he started, and Christian Walker was the regular who made way for him. Going forward, Peralta’s presence could impact Jarrod Dyson and Tim Locastro, who had been splitting time in left field. A change in the batting order could be in the works, as Dyson and Locastro have been serving as the leadoff hitters. Peralta has batted exclusively in the third and fourth spots so far this season.
Read the rest of this entry »

Playing time can make or break a baseball player’s fantasy value. An elite player may not finish above replacement level if he suffers an injury and plays only half the season, and a lackluster player could finish above replacement level simply by playing every single day. This is all intuitive, and the fantasy community generally approaches these kinds of things rationally. In other words, most players are appropriately valued, outside of the market inefficiencies that inevitably warp player values.

One-dimensional speedsters — dudes who steal a bunch of bases and do little else — are much harder to peg. Their value is tied up primarily in one category, as stolen bases (SBs) do not directly correlate with other categories the way home runs would with runs and RBI, for example. The issue becomes all the more confounding when one considers the contemporaneous scarcity of SBs relative to home runs. There’s more to value than just SBs and plate appearances (PAs), but the fact of the matter is the two statistics by themselves correlate very strongly with a player’s end-of-season (EOS) value (which, here, are informed by Razzball’s Player Rater).

In the last five years, baseball has seen 75 player-seasons of 30-plus SBs — 15 steals a year on average, a trend that didn’t fundamentally change in 2016 (although that doesn’t mean SBs aren’t scarce). A simple linear regression of SBs and PAs, the latter of which serves as a proxy for other counting stats such as runs and RBI, against EOS value produces a remarkable 0.71 adjusted R²:

Read the rest of this entry »