Homer Run Risers and Fallers: Batted-Ball Profile Changes for Fantasy Baseball
We are closing in on the end of April, which means we have a pretty decent-sized data sample for hitters now. The league leaders will clear 100 plate appearances in the next week or so, which gives us a lot of good stuff to look into. A lot of times we find a breakout or... Read More
Breakout Hitters to Watch for Fantasy Baseball Week 4
Welcome back RotoBallers to another edition of my "Breakout Hitters To Watch" series. What we're doing here is taking good, close look at the hitting data each week to see which hitters are standing out the most. The idea is to find hitters that have made changes and/or really improved this season to find start-worthy... Read More
Hitter Advanced Metrics Studs and Duds - Hard-Hit Rate for Week 3
Admittedly, it's still early for many sabermetrics to be considered descriptive but fantasy managers can't wait until midseason to start digging for hidden gems. You could always say that taking anything away from a two-week sample size is an overreaction. The purpose here is not to proclaim these players as the hard-hit kings or absolute... Read More
Pitcher Advanced Metrics Studs and Duds - Swinging-Strike Rate For Week 3
Welcome back to RotoBaller’s Statcast pitcher Studs and Duds article series! Each week, I will select one advanced metric, choose two pitchers with strong values and two with poor values, and analyze what those values may mean for future performance. We still have small sample sizes because the season is early, but a metric that... Read More
Breakout Hitters to Watch for Fantasy Baseball Week 3
Welcome back RotoBallers to another edition of my "Breakout Hitters To Watch" series. And just like that, we are on our third version of the weekly breakout hitter watch analysis. For those who are not familiar, I'll be writing this article weekly and it will be published on Thursday mornings. So far, we have identified... Read More
Hitter Advanced Metrics Studs and Duds - Max Exit Velocity for Week 2
We couldn't wait for the delayed 2022 season to get underway and now we eagerly await the Statcast data to accumulate so we can dissect it. It's obviously too early to make anything out of a majority of the data but we can evaluate something that requires one good swing of the bat - maximum... Read More
Pitcher Advanced Metrics Studs and Duds - xwOBA For Week 2
Welcome to the first edition of RotoBaller’s Statcast pitcher Studs and Duds article series for the 2022 season! I am happy to be back at the helm for this series once again. Statcast provides a ton of insightful advanced metrics that can be used to better understand pitchers' performance and predict future fantasy performance. Each... Read More
Breakout Hitters to Watch for Fantasy Baseball Week 2
We've got a week of baseball data in the books, and we're back for breakout hitter watch – week two! The data samples are still quite small, of course, so we have to continue to rely on some non-numerical data here. As you see, I'll still be relying a bit more on the current and... Read More
Breakout Hitters to Watch for Fantasy Baseball Week 1
It is finally Opening Day and I could not be happier to be here writing on RotoBaller to share it with all of you fine readers. We all made it through a particularly rough offseason and now we're ready to get back into the swing of things. I'm very excited about this series, which I... 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
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
Potential Home Run Risers: Fantasy Baseball Breakouts
Oftentimes in sports, we expect progression to be linear, and mainly with young players. However, as simple as it sounds, any player can get better. Particularly in baseball, which tends to be more skill-based than a sport such as football or basketball, development can happen at any time. Just take a look at the San Francisco... 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
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
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
Noteworthy Hitting Leaders (Chase Rates) - 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
Failure to Launch: Decreasing Launch Angles and Home Runs for Fantasy Baseball
Once the toast of advanced stats in the baseball universe, average launch angle’s prominence as a performance predictor has taken a step back to other power-focused metrics such as barrel rate and max exit velocity. Perhaps this is because the “launch angle revolution” from a few years ago turned out to be more of a... Read More
Noteworthy Hitting Leaders (xSLG) - 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
HR/FB: Using Sabermetrics for Fantasy Baseball
Using BABIP to predict a player's batting average is great. Batting average is a category in many league formats, and every hit is an opportunity to steal a base or score a run. Most fantasy managers find the long ball sexier. Every HR comes with a guaranteed run scored and at least one RBI. Many... Read More
Identifying Potential Pitcher Breakouts - Biggest Changes in Fastball Usage
Every year, we are looking at different ways to find fantasy baseball breakouts. This is particularly true on the pitching side of things. Pitchers tend to be more volatile in terms of their year-to-year performance than hitters, paving the way for under-the-radar talents to emerge as frontline starters. When that happens, you'll want them on... Read More
Batted Ball Data Analysis - How Consistent Are GB%, LD%, and FB% Year To Year
When we are evaluating hitters, we talk a lot about batted ball profile. When we're talking about this, things like launch angle and ground ball rate are cited quite often. I wanted to make a post to go over these things a bit more in-depth, giving our readers more complete knowledge of the subject at... Read More
Exit Velocity Leaders - Statcast Review for Fantasy Baseball
As we wait for MLB and the MLB Player's Association to work through the lockout issues and move forward with the 2022 baseball season, we've been digging into a few players that stand out as good fantasy investments based on their 2021 Statcast numbers. As with evaluations of any metric, these should be taken as... Read More
Biggest Brl/BBE% Fallers - Hitters
Welcome to part two of my pre-season series on 2021 barrel rate risers and fallers. In the first part, I looked at the players who showed the biggest barrel rate improvement in 2021 and broke down whether or not we should believe that success will carry over into 2022. In this article, I'll look at... Read More
Pitcher Advanced Metrics Studs and Duds - End of Season Review
Welcome back to RotoBaller’s Statcast pitcher Studs and Duds article series! Every week I have selected an advanced stat, chosen two top performers and two under-performers, and analyzed what those stats could mean for future fantasy output. I have covered both Statcast and Fangraphs metrics to help identify hidden value as well as sell-high candidates. With... Read More
Pitcher Advanced Metrics Studs and Duds - SIERA For Week 26
Welcome back to RotoBaller’s Statcast pitcher Studs and Duds article series! Each week I have selected an advanced stat, chosen two top performers and two under-performers, and analyzed what those stats could mean for future fantasy output. As the season winds down, I'll revisit one of my favorite metrics: SIERA. SIERA is a great metric... Read More
Pitcher Advanced Metrics Studs and Duds - Pitch Run Values For Week 25
Welcome back to RotoBaller’s Statcast pitcher Studs and Duds article series! Each week I have selected an advanced stat, chosen two top performers and two under-performers, and analyzed what those stats could mean for future fantasy output. This week I will focus on a stat that describes how particular pitches have performed overall: run value. Run value... Read More