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Welcome back to RotoBaller! I'm Jon Anderson, and today I'm kicking off a new series that I am very excited about. Every week, we will be looking into the season-long and recent data to identify outlier data points. We will then dive into the numbers and talk about why those numbers are outliers, and what that means we should expect moving forward.
This will be helpful for fantasy purposes in identifying what player performances are unsustainable, on the negative or positive side of the coin. Baseball is such a random game that we constantly see box score outputs that just don't really make any sense given the underlying inputs. We will identify a handful of these every week, which should help us decide on what players to buy or sell.
It will also just be a general fun time learning more about the stats and indicators, what they mean, and how to interpret them. This is my bread and butter, so I'm ready to start spreading it. Let's do the thing!
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Outlier: Cristian Javier's Strikeout Rate
The young Astros righty has taken his step into ace-hood in 2022, currently owning a 2.58 ERA with a beautiful WHIP of 0.96. He has done that on the back of a 34.3% strikeout rate that ranks fourth-best in baseball for pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched.
What fantasy managers may be dismayed to hear is that this strikeout rate appears to fall into the... (dun dun dunnnnnnn) OUTLIER CATEGORY.
The specific outlier here is the strikeout rate as compared to the swinging-strike rate (SwStr%) and called strike plus whiff rate (CSW%) behind it. Fair warning, we are going to use a lot of scatter plots in this post series, here's our first one:
What you see here is the relationship between strikeout rate and these two other metrics. SwStr% and CSW% are predictive of strikeout rate, meaning if you see high values on one side - you should expect to see a high value on the other, and vice versa. We can probably get away with just using SwStr% here (since that makes up more than half of the CSW% metric and swinging strikes are a bit more in the pitcher's control than called strikes since the umpire isn't involved), but it's nice to see the CSW% there also reflected by the color of the dots.
If you drew a line straight through the middle of all of those dots, your outliers would be the dots furthest away from the line. Javier would be one of those outliers, and he's on the "negative" side of it - meaning that his high strikeout rate has been a more positive output than we'd expect to see given those inputs. We already mentioned that he's fourth in the league in K% right now, but if we look at SwStr%, he is 14th in the league, and when we look at CSW%, he's way down at 72nd in the league. Let's look at the rest of the top-10 in K% and see where they rank:
| Pitcher | K% | K% Rank | SwStr% | SwStr% Rank | CSW% | CSW% Rank |
| Spencer Strider | 37.7% | 1 | 18.1% | 1 | 32.5 | 7 |
| Shane McClanahan | 36.0% | 2 | 18.0% | 2 | 36.5 | 1 |
| Dylan Cease | 34.5% | 3 | 17.2% | 4 | 32.5 | 7 |
| Cristian Javier | 34.3% | 4 | 14.6% | 15 | 27.9 | 72 |
| Shohei Ohtani | 34.1% | 5 | 16.1% | 8 | 33.6 | 4 |
| Corbin Burnes | 31.8% | 6 | 17.3% | 3 | 34.4 | 3 |
| Gerrit Cole | 31.5% | 7 | 16.4% | 7 | 33.2 | 5 |
| Brandon Woodruff | 31.4% | 8 | 15.7% | 9 | 31.8 | 11 |
| Carlos Rodon | 30.4% | 9 | 14.5% | 18 | 31.3 | 14 |
| Aaron Nola | 29.2% | 10 | 12.6% | 49 | 32.3 | 10 |
All data current as of July 5th, 2022
This table is really eye-popping. We see that seven of the top-10 in K% are also in the top-10 in SwStr%, with the same being true in CSW%. We do see Aaron Nola being far down the ranks in SwStr%, but we see him as a top-10 CSW% guy, and he has a history of doing this thing - so he's really not on the same level as Javier. The case is so strange with Javier given how bad his CSW% is compared to the rest of the names around him here.
Things have gotten even more insane lately, over Javier's last three starts, he has a strikeout rate of 47.8%. That itself is obviously an outlier, but it can happen over just a three-start sample. What is really wild is the CSW% being just 32.9%. Now that 32.9% is a great mark, as you can see from above, but its eliteness doesn't compare with the eliteness of a strikeout rate darn near 50%. For comparison's sake, Dylan Cease also has an absurd strikeout rate over the last three starts (40.6%), and his CSW% sits at 36.3% - more than three full points higher than what Javier has done.
Javier can continue to get strikeouts at a high rate, and his career strikeout rate mark of 30.5% suggests that he will - but the strikeout rate he's putting up this season is not one that is likely to be sustained - so act accordingly.
Outlier: Eric Lauer's 4-Seam Fastball
Lauer has, for most of the season, been quite dominant with his four-seam fastball. The pitch averages just 93.5 miles per hour on the radar gun, but hitters have had fits with given the delivery, movement, and command of the pitch.
For pitchers that have thrown at least 400 four-seamers this year, Lauer's 16.8% swinging-strike rate leads the Majors. Here are his swinging-strike rates on the pitch by start.
The big-league average swinging-strike rate on four-seamers is just 10.6%, and if we take relievers out of the equation, that number falls gets even smaller. Lauer has posterized the number. In fact, his mark is one of the best in recent baseball memory.
Do we really believe that Eric Lauer's fastball compares with the likes of Gerrit Cole, Jacob deGrom, Lance Lynn, and Chris Sale at their best? I have my doubts.
The 16.8% mark we see now isn't all that insane, the league leaders last year were at 15% (Alek Manoah). What was truly outlier-ish was the 18.7% rate he had posted on the pitch through his first 203 fastballs thrown (May 15th). That number fell precipitously down to 14.8% before his wildest start of the year on July 4th when he delivered 21 whiffs on the pitch - a season-high for an individual pitch (by a good margin).
It's a good fastball, but I'm not even willing to buy that it is this year's best four-seamer in terms of whiffs, much less a top-10 fastball of the last five seasons. He also has very little else to offer - throwing the four-seamer 46% of the time this year and having pretty mediocre marks on the rest of his stuff. I'll sell on Lauer rest of the season.
Outlier: Nolan Gorman's Ground-Ball Rate
The much-hyped Cardinals rookie has burst onto the scene, hitting seven homers so far in his 141 plate appearances. His 13.3% barrel rate backs up a strong home run rate and has made plenty of fantasy players quite excited.
Gorman, as plenty of young power hitters do, has struggled with the strikeout. His 31.2% K% is far too high to sustain Major League success with, but so far he's made up for most of that with the long ball. The problem we have here is that Gorman has hit these homers on a crazy low ground-ball rate.
In fact, his 21.7% GB% is the lowest ground-ball rate we have seen since 2018 for any hitter with at least 100 plate appearances in a given season.
For comparison's sake, the league ground-ball rate is 43.5%. In batted ball type stats, there's no reason to think that any hitter will gradually regress toward the mean. This is a stat that is well within the hitter's control - I am certain that Gorman will remain a fly-ball heavy hitter as we move forward. What I can't imagine is that he really keeps this rate under 25%.
More ground-balls, in theory, would mean fewer fly-balls, which would mean fewer home runs. There is the possibility that he starts hitting ground-balls in place of strikeouts, which would actually be a positive thing (instead of missing the ball entirely he just tops it and at least gives himself a chance to get on base). But more likely the heightened grounders will come at the expense of line drives and fly balls.
This outlier stat in particular isn't really one to get super worried about. If you roster Gorman, you should come to terms with the fact that he is not going to give you batting average and there are going to be some really bad weeks. I'm not making the claim that he won't hit plenty of homers, but I am suggesting that the rate at which he's hit them so far will likely slow down a bit. Proceed with caution!
Outlier: Isaac Paredes Home Run Rate
A relatively ignored player in the preseason, Rays' infielder Isaac Paredes has taken the game by storm of late.
Since May 22nd, Paredes has hit homered 11 times while posting a .942 OPS. Only 11 players have hit more homers than Paredes in that timespan. The problem we have here is that Paredes has no business hitting this many homers. Prior to Tuesday's games, he had racked up an incredibly high 39.4% HR/FB rate, meaning that 39.4% of the fly balls he has hit have gone for homers. The league average? 15%.
This is another stat that is not created equal for all players. Certain players should be expected to post higher or lower HR/FB rates than the league average. One good way to know who these players are would be to look at how hard they are hitting their fly balls on average. Giancarlo Stanton will routinely crush a 15% mark, while someone like David Fletcher will be well below it. So where does Paredes stand here? To find out, I plotted every hitter's HR/FB along with their average fly ball velocity and highlighted Paredes' dot:
The dot there quite literally extends the plot all by itself. He has the highest HR/FB in the league. We would expect that to mean he's hit fly balls very hard, but he has not, with an average fly ball velocity of just 92.6 miles per hour (meanwhile the rest of the top-five all have average velo marks above 96.5). You can hover over each dot to reveal who it is, but you can see that in Paredes' case, it's true outlier stuff.
The redeeming quality here is that this guy makes tons of contact. He should maintain a strong batting average and could even provide some good RBI production if his good luck continues to translate into starts in the middle of the lineup. I'm guessing the Rays are well aware of this, however, so it won't be shocking if we see Paredes quickly lose playing time after this power production cools off, which I expect it to do - like... yesterday.
Alrighty, there's our first edition of OUTLIERS! Hope you enjoyed it, and hope you check back next week!
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