Between researching for my DFS teams and putting together articles on Fantasy Labs, I end up looking at a LOT of spray charts on a daily basis. Most of them are fairly unremarkable, but there are a few that stand out. When you know that a player only has power to a very specific area, I think that makes it a lot easier to know when to target that player. With that in mind, here’s Brian Dozier:
About 98% of his home runs go to far left and left center fields. I didn’t split the above spray chart down by handedness, so this means that whether Dozier is facing a righty or lefty, if he’s hitting it out, it’s going to a very specific area. (Fun fact: As I was writing this article, Dozier just hit one off the Green Monster…in left field). Another observation from the above spray chart is that Dozier seems to hit a lot more line drives to left and more fly balls to right. Here’s Fangraphs’ Hit Type Chart for Dozier:
Wow. Whether Dozier is facing a righty or a lefty, there’s very little chance he’s going to get anything going to the entire right half of the field. Meanwhile, he might be one of the best left-half-of-the-field-players in the game. His power to left is pretty legitimate as evidenced by his home/away splits. Only five parks have a deeper left field than Target Field, and its left center field depth is around league average. Dozier has hit roughly the same number of home runs at Target Field as he has on the road. Running a Home/Road Trend on Fantasy Labs for Dozier, however, shows that he has been slightly better in Plus/Minus at home:
Although Dozier has kept his personal home/road split fairly even, the Twins as a team have fared much better as an offense at home. They currently rank 3rd in the league in run production at home and 24th on the road. Perhaps fewer opportunities for Dozier to score runs and drive runs in has caused his difference in Plus/Minus.
Knowing what we now know, when is it best to deploy Brian Dozier in daily fantasy baseball? In 2014, he gained a reputation as a lefty masher and while he is still capable of taking a righty out to left field, his wOBA, ISO, and HR/AB numbers are all significantly higher versus lefties over his career. It will also be advantageous to target Dozier in parks with shorter far left and left center fields. In the AL, those are O.co, Oriole Park, Progressive, and Comerica. Because of the specificity of the search criteria, the result set is pretty small, but here is Dozier under those circumstances:
