After looking at Zack Greinke, David Price, and Johnny Cueto, it’s time to highlight a couple of hitters who changed ball clubs over the summer. Today, we’ll start with Todd Frazier, who moves from Cincinnati over to Chicago to join the White Sox.
Coincidentally, last June, I wrote a piece that looked at how awesome Todd Frazier was playing at home in Cincinnati. You can find that article here . Let’s go over a few key takeaways from that article before we move on.
1.) I pointed out that Great American Ball Park ranks within the top five MLB ball parks in terms of shortest distance to far left and left center fields. I then linked Todd Frazier’s FanGraphs spray chart from 2015. Below is his updated 2015 spray chart. Approximately 75% of his home runs last season were hit to far left or left center, making Great American an ideal match for his power profile.
2.) With that in mind, I took a look at his home/away splits. Here are his career home/away numbers, also from FanGraphs. Up until 2016, he’d been with Cincinnati his entire career, so this can also be read as “Great American Ball Park versus all other ball parks.”
3.) To put this in a DFS-context, we can use the “Home/Away” filter using FantasyLabs’ MLB Trends after selecting “Todd Frazier” from Player Filters. Over the past two seasons, the results have been night and day:
4.) Finally, I looked at Frazier’s FantasyLabs splits in games where the Reds were the favorite versus the underdog. When we look at all batters, they add about a half a fantasy point when their team is favored. In Todd’s case, the split was closer to a point and a half, which is a pretty significant amount:
I loved Todd Frazier, the Cincinnati Red, because he was nice and predictable – play him when he’s at home and Vegas likes the Reds. Will Todd Frazier on the White Sox be significantly different?
Maybe most importantly, Frazier’s power will likely remain intact at US Cellular Field. Every home run that Frazier hit out last season would also have made it out in Chicago per ESPN’S Home Run Tracker:
Backing up a bit to a more general level, US Cellular Field has been an above average host for right-handed batters over the past couple of seasons. Looking at visitor production of right-handed hitters by ball park shows US Cellular ranks #10 with a +0.14 Plus/Minus, only slightly behind Great American Ball Park, which ranks seventh with a +0.21 score:
We also know that Frazier has fared better when his team is the projected favorite. The good news here is that FanGraphs has projected the White Sox to win nine more games than the Reds this season (81-72) in 2016. If that trend holds up this season, we can give Frazier a slight bump.
All told, we can probably expect similar, maybe slightly better production from Frazier in 2016. If you remember back to 2015, Frazier’s value sort of fell off a cliff at the end of the season. He posted a negative Plus/Minus value in each month after June. Eventually, he was even moved around in the order, frequently hitting two, five, or six as the season wound down. The Reds finished as a bottom two team in 2015, a place we don’t expect (key word: expect) the White Sox to find themselves this year. In MLB probably more than any other DFS sport, a rising tide lifts all ships, meaning we might be able to expect more consistency from Frazier on a more successful team this season.
