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Welcome to Contact Rate Risers and Fallers! Our premium tools allow us to get out ahead of trends in player performance, including contact rate. Every Wednesday, we'll be looking at some players that have seen an increase in contact rate and some that have seen it decline.
Contact rate can foretell a player's batting average and general hitting statistics, and any drastic change could signal a shift in performance. Contact rate shifts often act as a precursor to hot streaks and slumps.
Here is a breakdown of some of the biggest fantasy relevant risers and fallers in contact rate over the last seven days.
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Contact Rate Risers
Gregory Polanco (OF, PIT): 96% contact rate last seven days (+22%)
Polanco is coming off an amazing week, hitting .391 with a 1.309 OPS and just one strikeout in 29 PA. Prior to this week Polanco was having a miserable August, hitting .159 with a 30% strikeout rate and .483 OPS. He has been a tremendously streaky player all season, and even a cursory review of his month-by-month performance proves that. He has two months with an OPS of .998 or higher, and three months with an OPS below .750. Overall Polanco is having both his worst year in terms of contact rate (78%) and strikeout rate (22.5%), but he is having his best year offensively. His .248 ISO is by far a career high thanks to a huge rise in launch angle. Polanco has an average launch angle of 20.1 degrees, a seven degree increase over last season. His .248 BA is his lowest since his rookie season, but he had been in the .250-.260 range in previous seasons. It’s not as if selling out for power is costing him too much batting average, and his 22.5% strikeout rate is only a tick above league average. This isn’t the way we expected Polanco to find success; he was supposed to be a tools-y power-speed combination type of player. Polanco isn’t the 20-30 guy he was once prognosticated to be, but he is a useful player as it stands. Don’t expect a batting average above .260, but he could wind up with 25 homers and double digit steals by season’s end.
Tyler Austin (1B, MIN): 79% contact rate last seven days (+19%)
Austin has quietly been a monster since being traded to Minnesota, hitting .333 with six homers, and last week was perhaps his best of all. Austin hit three homers, had a 1.089 OPS and four strikeouts in 20 PA. Austin has always had prodigious power with a career .262 ISO in the majors, but the whole contact thing has been struggle. He has a career 62.6% contact rate and 37.6% strikeout rate, and those are about where his numbers are this season. Those numbers are Joey Gallo-esque, and Gallo is the only qualified hitter with a contact rate lower than Austin. When your hot week still has a 20% strikeout rate and a contact rate barely above league average it speaks to how poor the baseline is for Austin. Austin’s profile sounds quite familiar with another big-time power hitter as well. Yankees prospect, slow to develop, right-hander with gargantuan power, inability to make consistent contact. It would be ridiculous to call anyone the next Aaron Judge, but there are lots of similarities between the two. Austin has elite power numbers this season with a .301 ISO and 14 home runs in 178 PA. There is something very interesting in this profile, and while Austin will struggle to hit above .250 the sky is the limit in terms of power. He’s only 5% owned in Yahoo leagues as of writing this, and Austin is a very interesting player to add for the stretch run. He could be a late season difference maker in the power department.
Derek Dietrich (1B/2B/3B/OF, MIA): 90% contact rate last seven days (+18%)
It was a very Derek Dietrich-like week for the Marlins’ swiss-army knife. Dietrich hit .286 with a .652 OPS and two strikeouts in 22 PA. Dietrich’s overall numbers look like a typical Derek Dietrich season. He’s hitting .270 with a .761 OPS and .159 ISO, but much of those numbers were banked during a scorching hot streak back in June. In the month of June Dietrich hit .344 with five of his 15 homers. What’s even more concerning is that three of those five homers came at Coors Field, so his hot month was amplified by the best hitter’s park in baseball. He’s been quite awful since June, hitting .229 with a .649 OPS and 26% strikeout rate. Ultimately what we have here is a slightly above replacement level utility man that has been resting on the laurels of that June hot streak to moderate ownership for two months. Why is he 37% owned in Yahoo leagues? Tyler Austin is a much better player to own at this point in the season. Dietrich doesn’t have much power and his .247 xBA suggests that his current batting average of .270 is unsustainable. That makes sense, since he has a .340 BABIP and just an 87.3 MPH average exit velocity. His multi-positional eligibility is his only real fantasy asset.
Contact Rate Fallers
J.T. Realmuto (C, MIA): 50% contact rate last seven days (-29%)
It was a rough week for Realmuto, who hit just .056 with nine strikeouts in 23 PA. This was quite uncharacteristic for Realmuto, whose 18.3% strikeout rate is above league average and even more above average for a catcher. The average MLB catcher strikes out 23.3% of the time and has a 76.7% contact rate, and Realmuto is above average in both regards. With so many injuries and busts with the higher end catchers this season the case for Realmuto as the number one fantasy catcher right now is pretty clear cut. A healthy Gary Sanchez is about the only thing that could unseat him. There isn’t reason to panic with Realmuto; he has a .282 xBA and .364 xwOBA on the year, which align almost perfectly with his actual statistics. Just continue to start Realmuto and better results should come.
Paul DeJong (SS, STL): 50% contact rate last seven days (-21%)
DeJong’s hot August came to a screeching halt last week. He hit just .150 with a .527 OPS and 10 strikeouts in 22 PA. His hot August should be graded on a curve, since he was only hitting .219 before this week, but he had four home runs and a .266 ISO during the month. DeJong hasn’t maintained his production from his breakout 2017 season, and that shouldn’t be too surprising since DeJong’s 2017 was built on a wobbly foundation. He had a 20% HR/FB ratio and a .349 BABIP. This season his HR/FB ratio fell to 13.7% and his BABIP dropped to .282. On the bright side DeJong cut his strikeout rate by 2.2% and nearly doubled his walk rate, so even though his BA is more than 50 points lower this year his OBP only dropped 13 points. His lack of power and .233 BA are an overcorrection from last season’s over-performance, and DeJong’s .492 xSLG and .348 xwOBA are actually higher this season than in 2017. Like many of the risers and fallers this week, DeJong may struggle to hit above .250, but he should have decent power for a shortstop going forward.
Giancarlo Stanton (OF, NYY): 46% contact rate last seven days (-19%)
Oh boy. We got one of Giancarlo Stanton’s famous bad weeks last week, and hit just .143 with a .473 OPS and 15 strikeouts in 34 PA. Stanton was stymied by the famously tough Baltimore Orioles pitching staff, going 1-for-20 with eight strikeouts in a four-game, three day weekend series with the O’s. Stanton was mashing in August before this week, hitting .324 with eight homers in 86 PA. Then out of nowhere he flipped completely and gave us putrid production. Stanton is in his ninth major league season now, and it’s safe to say that this type of streakiness is an inherent part of his game, inextricably embedded within him much like the mammoth power we know and love. His 2017 season where Stanton struck out just 23.6% of the time and hit 59 homers appears to be the outlier. That’s fine, Stanton is still a top-20 player and an elite power hitter, he’s just flawed. Few players are flawless, and Giancarlo Stanton isn’t one of them. He’s still a must start player based on his raw ability. Was this week a harbinger of things to come? Hopefully not, and it’s not worth benching Stanton out of fear of a cold streak.
