RADIO
Welcome back to RotoBaller! I'm Jon Anderson, and today we are back for the second edition of the OUTLIERS series. Every week (or so), 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: Christian Bethancourt's wOBA
This guy has recently been in the news as the Rays made a trade for him, grabbing him from Oakland. I think the Rays may have seen what we're about to talk about with Bethancourt, and that is that he's been one of the least fortunate hitters in the league this year.
Bethancourt has posted a really strong 14% barrel rate this year in his 182 plate appearances. That comes with a strikeout rate that is right around the league average at 22.5%. The list of hitters with at least 150 PAs this year with a barrel rate above 12% and a strikeout rate below 23% is not a very long one. Those names along with their homer counts this year:
- Juan Soto (17)
- Pete Alonso (23)
- Marcell Ozuna (17)
- Rafael Devers (19)
- Christian Walker (21)
- Rowdy Tellez (17)
- Brandon Drury (18)
- Yordan Alvarez (26)
- Bryce Harper (15)
- Joc Pederson (17)
- Christian Bethancourt (4)
So you can see that Bethancourt's four-homer total just doesn't make a ton of sense (although most of that is explained by the fact that he only has 182 plate appearances while the league leaders are already nearing 400).
If we plot every hitter's xwOBA along with their wOBA, Bethancourt stands out as a negative outlier:
His wOBA for the year is .300 but he has a much better xwOBA of .382. Only three qualified hitters have a higher differential in this direction than that (Kyle Higashioka, Austin Meadows, and Sam Hilliard).
Bethancourt has 18 barrels this year, with only four of them going for homers, that's a HR/Barrel rate of 22% – which is well below the league average that sits in the mid-fifties. He lines up in the bottom five in that category, here's a sneak peek at my barrel performance leaderboard.
Playing half of your games in the Oakland Coliseum, you will naturally have some of this – that stadium has long been one of the tougher stadiums to hit a ball out of, so it's even better news that he has now escaped that park. If the Rays make Bethancourt an everyday player, the homers should be coming at a nice rate moving forward, and you can slide Bethancourt into your catcher slot on your fantasy roster, which is huge.
Outlier: Tony Gonsolin's WHIP
Fifteen qualified pitchers have WHIPs under one this year. Here are those names along with their K% and BB%.
| Pitcher | K% | BB% | WHIP |
| Tony Gonsolin | 24% | 6.9% | 0.80 |
| Shane McClanahan | 36% | 4.8% | 0.81 |
| Justin Verlander | 24.6% | 4.8% | 0.87 |
| Keegan Akin | 21.6% | 6.7% | 0.87 |
| Max Scherzer | 32.7% | 5.1% | 0.88 |
| Corbin Burnes | 32.4% | 6.3% | 0.89 |
| Sandy Alcantara | 22.4% | 6.3% | 0.91 |
| Aaron Nola | 27.8% | 3.5% | 0.93 |
| Joe Musgrove | 25.5% | 6.0% | 0.93 |
| Spencer Strider | 39.1% | 9.6% | 0.97 |
| Alek Manoah | 22.7% | 5.8% | 0.98 |
| Shohei Ohtani | 24.4% | 6.2% | 0.99 |
| Cristian Javier | 34.1% | 9.0% | 0.99 |
| Yu Darvish | 22.4% | 4.9% | 0.99 |
| Miles Mikolas | 19.7% | 5.2% | 0.99 |
The key component of WHIP is K-BB%. There is a pretty linear relationship between these two statistics, and Gonsolin is nowhere near the trend line.
Among qualified pitchers, Gonsolin has the best WHIP, but just the 43rd best K-BB%. There is no way this guy can sustain a WHIP below 0.9, and I would be guessing that he posts a WHIP closer to 1.10 for the rest of the year. I would call Gonsolin a pretty darn good sell-high as we head towards the second half.
Outlier: Jordan Montgomery's Low K%
This is the reverse case from the Cristian Javier analysis last week when we saw that his K% really didn't match up with his CSW% and SwStr%.
In 2021, Montgomery posted a 13.7% SwStr% and that came with a 24.5% K%. Those two numbers make perfect sense together. This year, he has repeated that same exact 13.7% SwStr%, but somehow the strikeout rate has fallen to 19.6%. Here's the plot:
You can see he really stands out here, and has a pretty solid CSW% as well as that dot shows red. I am racking my brain for what other things might explain this, but I can't really come up with anything. I thought well maybe he's not really going for the strikeout when he has two strikes on a guy. He's just being content to try to spot a pitch on a corner and letting a ball be put in play. That isn't the case. Here's how he's attacked hitters in 0-2, 1-2, and 2-2 counts this year:
| Pitch | Pitches | Zone% | SwStr% |
| Curveball | 134 | 13.4% | 23.9% |
| Changeup | 82 | 26.8% | 9.8% |
| Sinker | 71 | 60.6% | 14.1% |
| 4-Seam Fastball | 37 | 32.4% | 8.1% |
| Cutter | 10 | 30.0% | 10.0% |
So he has mostly thrown curveballs out of the zone in these counts, and his second most-used pitch is the changeup, which has also mostly been thrown out of the strike zone. This is a perfectly sensible way to attack when ahead in the count, so there's nothing really there to explain his low K% either.
I'm projecting Montgomery for a 23-25% K% moving forward, which makes him a decent buy right now.
Outlier: Dean Kremer's ERA
Orioles righty Dean Kremer has made seven starts this season and has given up runs in just three of them. Over his last five starts, he's given up just five earned runs, which all came in one start against the Rangers. He has a 1.62 ERA over his last six starts and a 2.15 mark for the year.
| IP | K% | BB% | ERA | FIP | xFIP | SIERA |
| 37.2 | 19.4% | 7.7% | 2.15 | 3.32 | 4.65 | 4.49 |
I don't think I need to do the heavy lifting here to prove that the 2.15 ERA on Kremer is just ridiculous. The guy is doing nothing well this year, and has an egregiously low 3.9% HR/FB rate (11.8% career) and has given up just two homers on the 11 barrels he's given up for an 18.2% HR/Brl. Only two pitchers (Kevin Gausman and Konnor Pilkington) have a lower rate than while giving up at least 10 barrels this season.
If you're reading this, I doubt you bought into Kremer in the first place, but if for some reason you did, it's not too late to repent and drop him. Bad times ahead for old Dean.
And that's it for the second edition of outliers! Thanks for being here!
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