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Identifying Risk via ATC Projections – Round 1
Statcast Pitch Tracking: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
When you're evaluating a pitcher by Pitch Info on FanGraphs, sometimes you see pitches that don't seem to accomplish anything. If Pitch X is seldom a strike, rarely chased outside of the zone, and not generating whiffs or a favorable batted line against, why doesn't the pitcher scrap it entirely? Some pitchers could improve by... Read More
High-Upside Starting Pitchers: Swinging Strike Edition
Unlike the fantasy football world, there are not a lot of casual baseball fans playing the fantasy game. Have you ever heard of a friendly office fantasy baseball league? Probably not. If you're playing fantasy baseball for any actual stake, you are most likely competing against people who know what they're doing - at least... Read More
Pitcher Statcast: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
Statcast metrics such as Barrels and Brls/BBE are great ways to evaluate a batter's performance, so it is only natural to assume that the metrics would be predictive for pitchers as well. As much as batters want to hit a Barrel every time, pitchers want to avoid them at all costs. Yet there is evidence... Read More
Adventures in Positional Scarcity - Catchers Edition for Fantasy Baseball Drafts
This question of how to handle the catcher position has taken on a new level of tough in 2022, at least in the opinion of this analyst. Catchers have always underperformed offensively relative to the rest of the positions, mainly because the first bullet point on their job description is not to hit the ball... Read More
Spring Training Skill Searching: Pitch Velocity Gainers - Mitch Keller, Joe Ryan, Madison Bumgarner and more
Not much trustworthy data comes out of Spring Training. Players are just getting back into the swing of things, and the data samples are inherently small. This means we have to tread very lightly when looking at spring data. The data points we can take a bit more seriously are the skill-based metrics. Numbers that... Read More
Spring Training Skill Searching: Max Exit Velocity Standouts - Brendan Rodgers, Sam Hilliard, Christian Walker, Miguel Andujar
For most advanced baseball statistics, you need plenty of data to be available before you can start interpreting them. There is so much randomness and variance in baseball, that you really cannot glean any insights from a handful of games. This doesn't turn out to be true when we're looking at maximum exit velocity. This... Read More
Statcast xStats: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
Statcast is a valuable tool for fantasy analysis, and it can be easy to look at a stat called "Expected Batting Average" and blindly use it as your projection moving forward. Of course, proper use of these metrics is a little bit more nuanced than that. First, a disclaimer: This article is about the "Expected... Read More
FaBIO Analysis: Flyballer Starting Pitcher Prospects, Left-Handed Edition
In the opener of this pitcher prospect twinbill we introduced FaBIO and presented data from its application to flyballer righthanded starting pitcher prospects. Now let's do the same for flyballer lefthanded starting pitcher prospects. I'll keep the summary of FaBIO short here as the prior RHSP article more fully explains the FaBIO methodology. Every plate... Read More
K-BB% Gainers: Starting Pitchers to Watch in 2022
If I were on a desert island and had to pick just one statistic to take with me to evaluate starting pitchers for fantasy baseball purposes, I would choose strikeout-to-walk ratio. Would I have bigger problems than picking the best pitchers for my fantasy team if I ever found myself alone on a desert island?... Read More
Adventures in Scarcity: Stolen Bases Edition
In this series of posts, I will go through a few situations in today's fantasy baseball game where resources are scarce. These are the parts of the game where the smartest and best players really excel, as they recognize the scarcity and know how to use it to their advantage. Category scoring is a zero-sum... Read More
Barrels and Brls/BBE: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
We've previously looked at how exit velocity is only one piece of the fantasy analysis puzzle. Baseball broadcasts will commonly cite Launch Angle (LA) to complement their EV figures, but it is given in terms of degrees. LA is basically a fancy way of saying things that the fantasy community has used for years. Am... Read More
FaBIO Analysis: Flyballer Starting Pitcher Prospects, Right-Handed Edition
I developed the Fielding- and Ballpark-Independent Outcomes (FaBIO) pitcher evaluation system circa 2013 as a tool for quantifying non-batted-ball and batted-ball fundamentals of individual pro pitchers versus batters of both and either handedness type. Since the model was first applied to affiliated 2013 MiLB play, its reach has been extended to MLB, NCAA Division 1,... Read More
Incorporating a Shift Ban into Hitter Projections
With the announcement of a likely shift ban in 2023, fantasy baseball analysts ought to prepare. Many good articles have been written about the shift ban recently, with most echoing the sentiment that the leaguewide impact will be modest. Further, it is conventional wisdom that pull-heavy lefthanders would benefit the most. However, the size of... Read More
Spin Rate: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
Spin rate has become one of the most recognizable Statcast metrics, with supporters of a given pitcher highlighting his spin rates to make their case. It has also become controversial as of late due to allegations of pitchers using foreign substances to increase their spin. Unfortunately, the baseball world has done a lousy job conveying... Read More
High-Upside Hitters for Fantasy Baseball - Deeper Leagues Analysis
If you are drafting this early in the fantasy baseball season, you are probably playing in some pretty serious leagues. That means there is a good chance your draft is stretching past 300 picks. It is very tough to keep a large player pool sorted out in your head, and it's not hard to get... Read More
High-Upside Starting Pitchers for Fantasy Baseball: "Stuff" Edition
In the first analysis of my "finding high-upside starting pitchers" series, I looked in depth at swinging-strike rate. You can read that here. That analysis looked at overall SwStr% for every pitcher, taking into account all of their pitch types to one SwStr% number. In this article, I want to go a step further and... Read More
Noteworthy Hitting Leaders (xBA) - Statcast Review for Fantasy Baseball
There are stats for everything now. It's great, but it can also be overwhelming at times. Depending on where we look, we can tell ourselves all different types of narratives about a player. As a result, I've always been a proponent of identifying the stats that you find to be most useful/beneficial and focusing on... Read More
Contact Rate Gainers - Statcast Review for Fantasy Baseball
As the MLB and MLBPA keep working towards ending the lockout and getting baseball back into our lives, we've been keeping the offseason content going by digging into some 2021 stats. While we all obviously want the lockout to end, this is a useful time to do your research and have a better understanding of... Read More
Biggest Brl/BBE% Gainers - Statcast Review for Fantasy Baseball Hitters
Often when it comes to fantasy baseball, we get overloaded with statistics and it becomes hard to sort out what's useful from what's misleading. Many experts can write pages about why they swear by certain stats as being the most predictive for future success or accurate in reflecting who had a good season. While the... Read More
Incorporating Stuff+ Into Traditional Pitching Projections
Recent times have birthed innovative metrics that measure pitcher quality, independent of traditional results like K% or BB%. The most prominent of these are probably Pitching+, Stuff+, Location+, and Command+, all published by Max Bay and Eno Sarris at The Athletic (I want to thank Eno for providing encouragement on this article, though all mistakes... Read More
Statcast Exit Velocity: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
If you've watched a baseball broadcast in the Statcast Era, you have undoubtedly noticed the broadcasters commenting on a batted ball's exit velocity, or EV. Many have taken to using stats like Hard% and Soft% to forecast how a player should be performing, expecting larger Hard% rates to produce larger BABIP and HR/FB figures. There... Read More
Improved Hitter K% vs. Power Production - Fantasy Baseball Risers
There are plenty of different ways for a hitter to improve at the plate. We see dozens of players every year who make huge improvements at the plate, and it's very important for fantasy managers to identify these hitters earlier than the field does. Sometimes these improvements can be driven by luck, sometimes by a... Read More
Ballpark Factors: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
If you have ever selected a streamable pitcher based on a home park or benched an otherwise must-start arm at Coors Field, you already know how much a stadium can impact a player's bottom line. Ballpark Factors quantify the influence each stadium has, allowing you to make the most of your fantasy team's real-life schedule.... Read More
Starting Pitchers Home Run Luck Analysis for Fantasy Baseball
The three best predictors of earned run average turn out to be strikeouts, walk, and home runs allowed. These are the three components of most advanced ERA metrics (like FIP, xFIP, SIERA, etc.). Adding on stats into these ERA prediction models can help accuracy a bit more, but most of the heavy lifting is done... Read More
Pitch Info: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
One of the most fundamental questions in fantasy sports is if a player's current performance is sustainable. More than any other sport, baseball has a slew of statistical measures that can be dissected in numerous ways to analyze player performance. Pitch Info is a publicly-available pitch tracking system that provides a lot of different data to... Read More
Pitcher Predictability Analysis for Fantasy Baseball
There are different ways to have success as a pitcher. You can have wipe-out stuff, pinpoint command, superior deception, or an arsenal of different pitch types that make it tough for a hitter to see what is coming next. The best pitchers will have all of those things going for them. For this fantasy baseball... Read More
Batting Order: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
You may be wondering why there aren't any advanced stats aimed at predicting a player's counting stats like runs and RBI. The answer is simple: modern sabermetrics reject the idea of a "clutch RBI guy" and therefore do not bother inventing predictive metrics for it. Runs and RBI are team-dependent stats and are unhelpful in ascertaining... Read More
Noteworthy Hitting Leaders (Pull Rate) - Statcast Review for Fantasy Baseball
As the MLB and MLBPA keep working towards ending the lockout and getting baseball back into our lives, we've been keeping the offseason content going by digging into some 2021 stats. While we all obviously want the lockout to end, this is a useful time to do your research and have a better understanding of... Read More
Pull%: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
We have previously determined that fantasy managers generally prefer batters to hit the ball into the air to have a chance at a home run. Yet, all fly balls are not equal for this purpose. A player can maximize his power production by pulling the ball in the air. One way to illustrate this is... Read More
