With the MLB trade deadline in our rearview mirror, and most league’s trade deadlines either passed or near, we should start thinking about next year and beyond – especially if we need to make keeper decisions. Using projections, 2019 performance, and Stat Cast data, we’ve attempted to list the top 30 Starting Pitchers for 2020. […]

With about four months of the season in the books and the trade deadline in the rearview mirror, we’re hitting the final home stretch in fantasy leagues.  Let’s try to help find some ‘hot rods’ for you (and also hopefully identify some ‘lemons’ for you to avoid or trade). To get a robust sample size, […]

Now that we’ve passed the quarter-pole of the 2019 season, we are starting to be able to deep dive into the underlying statistics with more confidence. A quick way to see which pitchers we could argue have been unlucky is to compare their xwOBA (derived from Stat Cast batted ball data) against their BABIP.  Because […]

This is the companion piece to the Hitter deep dive last week. Now that we have accumulated over a month of data, we can examine to see which starting pitchers have seen the most substantive changes (in both directions) in their pitching effectiveness, both in defense-independent results (e.g. K%, BB%) and with the underlying peripherals […]

We’ve gathered over a full month of data and some of the underlying metrics are starting to become more “stable” – by which we mean we can make more confident conclusions about whose performance this year is ”real”. The strikeout rate is one of the quickest hitting characteristics to stabilize; whereas batted ball metrics such […]

To use StatCast data for deep analysis on pitchers, I started with the simple difference between wOBA and xwOBA. The difference between actual results (i.e. wOBA) and expected results (based on the batted ball data for their pitches, i.e. xwOBA) would provide a crude high-level method to identify overachievers or underperformers thus far in the […]

We’re back with a new installment of Hot Rod or Lemon. This time we’re trying to get some names for you prior to Sunday night FAAB to maybe throw some money at (or to drop whilst picking up someone else). This article looks at StatCast data through Friday night’s games. Enjoy the list and please […]

It’s only been a week but already we can take a look at some batted ball numbers in StatCast. MLB has downloadable leaderboards for average exit velocity, ‘barrels’ per plate appearance and expected batting average – both for hitters and pitchers. Taking a look after about a week of games is not particularly definitive. However, […]

With the public availability of StatCast data, the baseball fan is now able to do deeper dives into players using information that was never before accessible. A fun thing I like to do is to compare players’ underlying peripherals to see which players have similar hitting profiles to each other. When thinking about what makes […]

Average Draft Position or ADP is commonly used to assist fantasy players in determining where to select batters and pitchers as they go through their draft. However, most ADP’s are derived from standard 5×5 categories and that presents challenges when leagues use another category such as OBP instead of batting average.  To assist those fantasy […]