In the MLB Recent Form Report, I apply filters listed under the “Adv Stats – Recent” heading of our MLB Trends tool. I am looking for players whose recent play has not shown up in their stats or whose production has been exceeding or falling short of expectations. The MLB Recent Form Report is released on Monday morning each week.

Batters

Denard Span

Usually, when I look at batters who are hitting the ball much harder over the past couple of weeks, I’m looking at power hitters. I wouldn’t put Span in that category, but we can see that his recent numbers are greater than his yearly averages.

Over the past 14 days, Span has increased his hard-hit percentage (HH%) by an impressive 24 percentage points. That is by far the highest mark among regular starters and his 51 percent HH% score over that same timeframe is tied for the highest mark overall.

Span’s average distance on batted balls is up by 22 feet, from 195 to 217. Even 217 feet puts him around league average in the category, but that’s because he has a very high groundball percentage (GB%) of 55 percent. As I wrote earlier, even though he is hitting the ball well, Span is unlikely to go on a homerun tear. But Span doesn’t need to be hitting the ball out of the yard in order to be valuable in DFS. If he is able to get on base more by hitting a higher percentage of sharp line drives, he will be able to rack up points through steals and runs.

Prince Fielder

For a power hitter, an increased GB% can mean trouble. Take Fielder, whose 48 percent GB% over the past calendar year has skyrocketed to 62 percent over the past 14 days. That has led to a drop in average distance of 27 feet, from 210 to 183. Interestingly, his exit velocity has remained the same. It doesn’t appear that Fielder is making softer contact with the ball. Rather, he has simply been too far on top of the ball and beating it into the ground.

Regardless, it’s not a good look for a player we’d normally target for power. Over his career, Fielder has homered about once in every 20 at-bats. If we look at players with similar power whose recent GB% is up over 60 percent, we can see how much of a negative effect that has had on fantasy production:

 

Until Fielder can start getting more underneath the ball, he’s going to be a player to avoid. Keep an eye on his average distance and average airtime as indicators over the coming days.

Pitchers

Jacob deGrom

deGrom was able to rack up seven strikeouts in his last start, but overall it wasn’t the type of performance that would make you forget about his concerns over the past month or so. He lasted only five innings and allowed four earned runs.

deGrom’s velocity has been down for the entire season, sitting mostly around 91-92 miles per hour. We would like to see him up around 94-95 MPH with his fastball, so that drop is very significant. In his last start, deGrom averaged 93.5 MPH on his fastball, which was his highest velocity of the 2016 season.

Maybe deGrom was feeling a little too good about having his velocity up, as he threw his fastball 72 percent of the time in that start. That accounts for the highest percentage of fastballs thrown by deGrom in a single start over his entire career by a pretty healthy margin. Still, if deGrom can stay around 93.5 MPH or even add another tick in his next start, I’d probably bet that the rest will take care of itself. If not . . .

Aaron Sanchez

Sanchez is one player whose velocity I’m not particularly concerned about. His average velocity has been down by around 1-1.5 MPH since the beginning of the 2016 season, but the results continue to be positive. Sanchez has failed to reach six innings pitched in only one of his starts this year.

That’s not the reason I don’t have concern for Sanchez though. I’m not concerned about him because he did the exact same thing last season. In 2015, he hung around 92-93 MPH in April-May before ramping his velocity up to 95-97 in the late summer.

I think it’s dangerous just to assume that pitchers will add velocity as the season goes on, but in this case I think that’s exactly what’s going to happen. While Sanchez has been good so far, the best is likely yet to come. Note his 85.7 percent Consistency in 14 starts when his recent average velocity has exceeded 94 MPH:

Conclusion

In this week’s Recent Form Report, I offered opposite takes on two pitchers whose early season velocities have been down, but I think that both takes were supported by the data. And that’s what’s great about our MLB Trends tool and specifically the advanced stat filters: You can leverage the data to reduce the guesswork when you see something that sticks out.