In MLB Recent Form Report, I apply filters listed under the “Adv Stats – Recent” heading of our MLB Trend Tool. I am looking for players whose recent play has not shown up in their stats or for justification on players who have been exceeding or falling short of expectations. MLB Recent Form Report is released on Monday morning each week.
In this installment of the Recent Form Report, I’m going to look at a slugger and an ace who have failed to live up to expectations so far in 2016, as well as a power hitter who may be on the verge of a hot streak. Let’s get right into it.
We currently have Kyle Hendricks listed with a velocity differential over the past 15 days of -3.0 mph. While we certainly can’t say this is good, it may be “less bad” in Hendricks’ case. If a pitcher who relies heavily on his fastball experiences a loss in velocity, the results could be disastrous. Over the past couple of seasons though, Hendricks has primarily relied on his sinker and change-up, calling fastball only around 12 percent of the time.
Hendricks’ sinker is down about two miles per hour (86.2 MPH in his last start). Some pitchers do add velocity as the season goes on, but Hendricks actually opened 2015 throwing around 89-90 MPH with both his fastball and sinker last April. Also concerning is the movement score FanGraphs gave Hendricks’ sinker during his last outing, which was his worst rating in the category since a 9-1 demolition by Cincinnati on 7/22/2015. With Hendricks, velocity isn’t everything, but there is still reason for concern moving forward.
For Chris Archer, the good news is that on 4/14, he brought his average fastball velocity back up to 94.3 MPH after two straight games at or below 93.5. The bad news is that even 94.3 is substantially slower than the 96/97 MPH heat Archer was mowing down opponents with last July and August. For a pitcher like Archer, velocity is very important. Look no further than the following trend, which shows how he has performed when his recent average velocity exceeds 95 MPH:
Compare that to below, which shows Archer below 95 MPH:
Personally, I won’t be rostering Archer again until he adds a couple of ticks to his average velocity.
On the batter side, I’m going to look at home run hitters whose average batted-ball distance exceeds 270 feet. Here are the particulars for the trend that I’m referencing:
And here are some recent qualifiers:
I’ll tip my cap to Jarrod Saltalamacchia, who hasn’t been making contact frequently (.227 avg), but when he does connect, the ball has traveled an absurd 345 feet on average. The player I’m going to focus on next, however, is J.D. Martinez. Despite owning a shiny .345 batting average to start 2016, J.D. has only one homer to show for his 277 average batted-ball distance. (Note: J.D. did homer Sunday after this was written.)
Historically, when J.D. has been hitting the ball as hard as he is now, fantasy points have come in bunches:
For proof, take a look at this hot streak last July:
On the other hand, let’s look at home run hitters with a low recent average batted-ball distance. Unsurprisingly, this has not been a great situation for power hitters:
The one player who sticks out here is Giancarlo Stanton, whose average distance on the year at the time of this writing is just 196 feet. For Stanton, this may be an April thing. Looking at his past results in games where his average batted-ball distance coming into the game was less than 200 feet, each of the 12 matches occurred in April of 2015 or April of 2016.
The sample size is small, which suggests his slumps tend not to linger. Still, until he starts getting some distance on the ball, Stanton may be a hitter you continue to fade.
In this article, I took a look at four players who stuck out to me, but there are many others you could put under the microscope. Can we quantify Madison Bumgarner’s slow start using our Recent Form Trends? Which 40-year-old first basemen is leading his position in average distance? The answers to these and many others lie within our MLB Trends tool and can be found using the Advanced Stats – Recent filters.
