The MLB Recent Form Report is released every Monday and will use FantasyLabs’ new advanced stats to locate players whose recent play may not have translated to under-the-hood stats DFS players are used to using, such as ISO and wOBA. By looking at how hard batters are hitting the ball and at pitchers’ recent velocity, we can attempt to get a jump on players who have been lucky or unlucky over recent games.
At this point in the season, we have too many pitchers who have made a single start to really gain anything meaningful from the 2016 advanced pitching stats. A week into the season though, we may be able to see some batter Trends forming. Moving forward, I will highlight one “Recent Form Trend” for batters and one for pitchers. Today, we’ll start with Hard Hit Differential. If you want to replicate this Trend, here are the details:
The “95-100” piece refers to a percentile rating, so in other words, we are looking at batters who have been hitting the ball significantly harder over the first week of the season than their average dating back to last season. In 2016, qualifiers have added around one-half fantasy point per game to their production.
As we open up Player Filters>Player Name to look at the results on an individual level, remember that “Count” is important here since the season just started. We want to find players whose average has held up over several games. Looking at the results, we can probably cite HH% as one of the main reasons several players have gotten off to fast starts, including Rizzo, Souza, Castro, and Fowler:
That’s great and all, but probably not especially actionable. These players are hitting the ball hard, yes, but it has shown up in their production, meaning that their DFS salaries have been raised and other players are aware that these guys are hitting well. What about players who are hitting the ball well, but have NOT had great fantasy production?
Troy Tulowitzki has a “Count” of five games, meaning that he has been hitting the ball hard all season. It’s pretty unfathomable then that, at the time of this writing, Tulo has scored 6.8 fantasy points per game BELOW expectations. Looking at his raw stats, his BABIP of .160 makes sense based on what we just saw. Tulo generally runs high in this category, posting .330-plus the past three seasons. In other words: as long as he continues hitting the ball hard, fantasy goodness is almost sure to follow, making him an attractive buy-low candidate at his current price tag.
Yasmany Tomas was a popular play at times over the second half of last season and has some interesting numbers over his first 20 plate appearances. Although his BABIP of .308 does not scream for positive regression, his HH% sits at 46.2%, which is up from 31.0% last season. Similarly, his Soft% and GB% are both down around 10 percent.
Khris Davis is a guy I have rostered a couple times this season and, as you might expect from the chart above, it has not gone well. Still, when you consider that Khris hit 27 home runs last season, and has opened 2016 making hard contact, he seems like a reasonable GPP dart throw that can be had at low price and ownership levels.
“CarGo is hitting the ball hard and plays half of his games at Coors Field. At some point, players may get sick of paying top dollar for Carlos and his .200 batting average. Gonzalez was red hot over the second half of 2015, hitting 27 of his 40 home runs after the All Star Break. He’s still smoking the ball off the bat, it just hasn’t led to fantasy production yet. His 53.8 HH% and .500 BABIP thus far in 2016 tell us it’s only a matter of time before that changes.” And just as I typed all of that, Gonzalez hit two homers at Coors Field. Yeah, I think he’ll be fine.
This article is sort of unique because it’s the only time of the year where we’ll be comparing this year’s stats to last season. Moving forward, we will be tracking the peaks and valleys of player performance through the MLB’s long season. I’ll be very interested to look at the instances when a player is “slumping” based on surface level stats, but based on our indicators, still hitting the ball hard. We have this unique opportunity thanks to the “Adv Stats Recent” portion of our MLB Trends tool.
