HITTING TARGETS

Targeting the right hitters in your draft can often be a tricky thing. Ideally, your offense would be made up of 14 (assuming it’s a two-catcher league with five outfielders, a middle infielder, a corner infielder and one utility player) completely balanced players who can hit .300 while going 20/20 by season’s end. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t always work that way, does it? There is nowhere near the number of five-tool players available for that to happen. That means you have to build your offense in different stages and what we’re going to do here is lay out each stage and target a number of specific players you’ll want to go after in your draft.

While I won’t sit here and give you a lesson in sabermetrics, I will say that there are a few statistics with which you need to familiarize yourself with to understand which hitters are worth targeting and which ones you want to leave to your competition. Some people get intimidated when presented with a whole bunch of number-crunching, so we’re not going to go into huge detail as to how these numbers are derived, but more what you should be looking for when presented the data. Call it a crash course in “Sabermetrics for Dummies.”

BABIP – It stands for Batting Average on Balls in Play and it measures how often a ball in play goes for a hit. No strikeouts, no walks, no sacrifice bunts and no home runs. The ball lands in the field of play for a hit. Typically, the average player’s BABIP is .300, though .299 was last year’s league average. Going above or below that benchmark obviously reflects what type of hitter you are. If your career BABIP is .320, you’re Adrian Gonzalez. If it’s .250, you’re Freddy Galvis. While luck can play a factor into a player’s BABIP, the word is usually used when a player’s BABIP has fluctuated significantly higher or lower than his career number. If Gonzalez has a .290 BABIP, you would say that he is suffering from some bad luck. Maybe the ground balls aren’t finding the holes or the line drives are being hit right at the fielders. Conversely, if Galvis has a BABIP of .300, you could say that he is particularly lucky at the moment. Players with a higher-than-average BABIP tend to have better batting averages and on-base percentages while they also stand the greater chance to record higher totals in the counting stats. Below is a list of players who, over the last three seasons, posted a cumulative BABIP over .300. We’ll leave out the obvious ones, as you don’t need me to tell you that Mike Trout is a good hitter with a strong BABIP, but we will leave in a few players who may have only played one season. After 400 plate appearances, you have a pretty good idea as to who can put the bat on the ball and who can’t.

LD% -- This stands for line-drive percentage. The fact of the matter is that line drives typically fall in for more hits than ground balls or fly balls. The league average in 2014 was 20.8 percent, which means we’re looking at hitters whose rate is higher. For example, Freddie Freeman has a career 26.7 percent line drive rate. Dan Uggla’s is 16.8 percent. Who’s the better target? For the sake of targeting hitters here, we’re looking at a cumulative line drive rate of 21 percent or more.

BB/K – The walk-to-strikeout ratio is a fairly good indicator of a player’s plate discipline. Yes, there are other factors that define plate discipline, but for the sake of this piece, we’re going to simply avoid swing rates. You can look those up on your own as you continue to refine your own search. Now obviously, players traditionally strike out more than they walk, so a career number of 1.00 or above is a rarity. The league average in 2014 was 0.37, but we’ll look for players significantly above that mark for our list. The better the plate discipline, the greater the on-base percentages and subsequently increased counting stats.

ISO – This abbreviation stands for Isolated Power, and it is a measure of a hitter’s raw power, telling you how often a player hits for extra bases. Doubles, triples and home runs are weighted accordingly in the formula, but for the sake of this piece, we’ll just work off the .135 league average mark from last season. It works like any of these other metrics. Above the mark means more power. Below the mark means less. This is your power, people. Our list below includes some of the top power hitters in the game over the last three years. Again, we’ve left out the more obvious ones. You should already know that Giancarlo Stanton has a high ISO and is one of the league’s premier power guys.

The above lists should give you some solid targets throughout your draft. If you need to draft more power, then look for the guys with the higher ISO rates. If you’re looking for on-base percentage, use those guys with the strong BB/K. The players above should prove to be strong options to help build the foundation of your team. And to now bring it all full circle, let’s put together one more list. There were 42 players who made the cut in all four of the above metrics, and these 42 players should be who you look to first when building your offense right from the start.

Now some of these players are definitely flawed. Concerns like Joey Votto’s diminishing power, Miguel Montero’s steady decline and Alex Avila’s concussion history should all be considered when deciding where to draft or how much to bid. But as always, this list is merely a guideline for you, not the gospel. This is more of a springboard. As the great Huggy Bear once said, “I lay it out for you to play it out.”