Fantasy Baseball Daily Trends: April 12, 2016

DFS DIAMONDS

*The following list of players are guys that Ray recommends as daily plays. He will try to avoid the obvious, so you will rarely see the Mike Trout’s and David Price’s of the world listed.

CATCHER: Chris Iannetta has gone 7-for-19 (.368) with a homer against Derek Holland. Iannetta has four hits in nine at-bats this season against lefties and he owns an impressive .867 OPS against lefties in his career.

FIRST BASE: Ryan Zimmerman is batting .400 and has a hit in all five games he’s played this season. He’s also gone 5-for-13 with two homers and five RBI against Jhoulys Chacin leading to a .563 wOBA in 15 plate appearances.

SECOND BASE: Robinson Cano has a .405/.436/.703 line against Derek Holland over 39 plate appearances. Cano has four homers and seven RBI in seven games this season.

THIRD BASE: Danny Valencia has a .440 wOBA against Hector Santiago over 15 plate appearances. Over the course of 713 plate appearances against lefties Valencia is the owner of a .371 wOBA.

SHORTSTOP: Righties hit .284 with a .338 OBP against Clay Buchholz last season. He also allowed five runs in four innings in his first start this season. J.J. Hardy has hits in three of his last four games and he is the owner of a .939 OPS against CB in his career (23 PAs).

OUTFIELD: Jeff Francoeur is the owner of a .446 wOBA against Gio Gonzalez over 25 plate appearances. He’s long been a better hitter against lefties (.279/.329/.452) than righties in his career.

OUTFIELD: Jon Jay is batting .409 with a .472 wOBA over 31 plate appearances against Charlie Morton. The righty hurler was hammered in his first start and Jay has five RBI and five runs scored in seven games.

OUTFIELD: Lefties have hit .290 with a .377 OBP against Tyler Chatwood in his career. He pitches in Colorado Tuesday where he’s posted a 4.60 ERA and 1.60 WHIP. Gregor Blanco has four hits in nine at-bats against Chatwood and owns a .302/.355/.453 slash line against the Rockies in 71 games.

THE STRIKEOUT TREND

Now, more than at any time previously, strikeouts are accepted. Hit a homer, drive a run in, strike out three times. Teams can live with that. However, there are some data points you have to know before you should accept that line of thought in the fantasy game.

Last season there were 16 men who posted a K-rate of at least 25 percent (minimum 502 plate appearances). Only three men were at 30 percent last season led by Chris Davis at 31.0 percent. By the way, K-rate is figured out by strikeouts divided by plate appearances.

Why is that significant? Let’s look at that list of 16 and see how they performed.

Of that group of 16 men eight, fully half, failed to hit 20 homers. You’d think all those strikeouts would lead to homers.

Of the 16 men how many hit .300 in 2016? The only one to do so was Nelson Cruz at .302. Of the other 15 men none hit higher than .282. That means of the 16 men who had a K-rate of 25.0 percent last season only one hit .283. Moreover, 11 failed to hit .260.

Keep all that in mind as we check in with the 2016 performances of folks, knowing full well that we’re talking about a week’s worth of data which clearly isn’t enough data to draw any meaningful long-term conclusions. ‘But Ray, after reading that last sentence, why should I keep reading when you say that you can’t draw any long-term conclusions that mean anything?’ Some nuance. (1) You cannot draw a full developed thought off of seven games. True. (2) In most cases I’m going to use the first week of this season as a spring board to look at the overall performance of a player. Simply, I’ll try diligently to look beyond what has occurred the past week and instead look at the totality of a player’s performance. (3) Especially in the case of young players, ineptitude and struggles early in a season can lead to a significant curtailing of playing time.

Here are some of the early season strugglers.

Again, keep in mind the sample size.

There are 11 men with a K-rate over 40 percent.

The Twins currently have a big problem with three of the top-4 on the list. Park has a home run, and we’re talking 24 plate appearances, but to this point he’s looked completely overmatched. He also struck out 17 times in 59 plate appearances in spring, a still poor 28.8 percent K-rate. His batting average appears to be in danger.

Buxton has been a total mess. He’s a tremendous talent, but as I noted above, young players who don’t make contact often end up with their butt being in contact with the bench. He has struck out a whopping 55 times in 160 career plate appearances leading to a sickly 34.4 K-rate.

Miguel Sano, and I warned about this in his Player Profile, has shown himself to be a massive batting average risk with his over the moon strikeout rate. Sano has 13 strikeouts in 26 plate appearances this season and has a 36.6 percent K-rate through 87 career games. Remember back to above, no one had a mark over 31 percent last season. Sano is staring at a 200 strikeout season and that’s going to make a replication of his .269 batting average from last season nearly impossible.

Davis only struck out 122 times last season so people might have missed that he did that in less than 395 at-bats. Over his last 469 plate appearances his K-rate is 28.8 percent as he’s hit just .243.  

Pederson came into the year with a terrible 29.0 percent mark. He’s blown past that in the early going at 42.3 percent. So many holes, and it doesn’t look like he’s done a very good job at cutting them down. He’s up to 192 punchouts in 532 at-bats.  

Guys off the above list…

Josh Donaldson owns an 18.8 percent mark for his career. Perhaps it’s his wonky ankle, but likely it’s just the sample size that has led him to nearly double that mark this season at 35.5 percent.

Paul Goldschmidt is above the worst mark in baseball last season at 33.3 percent. That number will come down as he’s been under 23.1 percent each of the last four seasons.

Mookie Betts is all kinds of fouled up in the early going. He’s walked once in six games and has struck out nine times leading to a 31.0 percent K-rate. The mark was just 12.5 percent last season.

One final note on Kris Bryant I wrote this recently. “…if I had to put a number on it, I would suggest that Bryant finishing the year closer to .250 than .275 in 2016 isn’t as far-fetched as some would lead you to believe.” It’s early, but Bryant has cut his 30.6 percent rate from his rookie season down to 21.2 percent. That’s at least encouraging.
 

We really need about a month to start to get a handle on this, but continue to follow the K-rate of your favorite players, it’s an important piece to the offensive game.