Six under the radar Statcast darlings for the 2020 season

Projections are decent for hitters, but until recently, those projections didn’t include much of the best research coming from the newest measurements in baseball. If you’re reading this, you know about the novel Statcast stats, which we’ve been using in an effort to get a leg up on the competition. We’ve been looking at things like maximum exit velocity, changes in launch angle, hard hit angle, and the like, and using those pieces of information to gain an advantage over many public projections.

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Well you can yell at Derek Carty if you like, because he’s now included all those things in his projections, likely making his THE BAT X projections the best in the business, and making it harder for us to get a leg up on everyone else.

In his words, what Carty has included in THE BAT X:

THE BAT is based mostly on traditional stats, while THE BAT X uses the optimal combination of traditional stats and Statcast metrics. I studied launch angle, exit velocity, barrels, sprint speed, spray angles, and 150+ different variations on them. Max exit velocity. Top X% of exit velocity. Exit velocity at various launch angles. Standard deviation of launch angle. Percentage of balls hit at various launch angles that lead to good/bad results. That sort of thing. I studied all of them, figured out how much variance was in each stat, how players age for each stat, how much historical data is relevant, whether sudden and drastic changes were a product of a conscience change in approach and thus stickier, etc. Then I ran tests to find the optimal combination of traditional stats and Statcast stats to optimize predictive accuracy and formed THE BAT X.

Sounds like THE BAT X is the projection system to use  (*and just a quick note — this isn’t any kind of partnership, affiliate deal, advertisement or anything with Derek…this is truly an opinion that these are the best projections and will help you win. Read on!).

Even better, Carty has both his regular The BAT projections as well as his Statcast-led The BAT X projections up on FanGraphs. So we can look at the batters that are the most different in each projection and identify some sleepers. Easy enough, and it looks like this exact method would’ve produced more than a few successful sleepers last year. Maybe we shouldn’t yell at Carty, then.

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Here are the top 20 players by the difference between their THE BAT and THE BAT X projected OPS. Lots of gold to mine in this list:

THE BAT X Darlings

Podcast listeners will recognize many of the players on this list. Yandy Díaz hits the snot out of the ball. Avisaíl Garcia is a Statcast monster. Shohei Ohtani absolutely lights up every tracking tech.

Just off the bottom are a few more you’d know. I’ve talked about how Dansby Swanson is a fun pick this year, and I’m not alone — he’s 24th. C.J. Cron has great exit velocity numbers, he’s 27th. Austin Meadows and Scott Kingery are right there, but the latter reminds us that the pure projected numbers are as important as the difference; the fact that THE BAT X likes Kingery to have a .730 OPS instead of a .705 won’t necessarily help you win your league.

But let’s highlight six guys on this list who we maybe haven’t talked enough about recently, and figure out how they got on this list.

Andrew Benintendi

This one might be a surprise because there’s not much black ink on Benintendi’s Statcast page. His Barrel rate (8.1%) is decent and above-average, but 119th out of 250 qualified batters is closer to ho-hum. He’s surrounded by José Altuve, Nick Senzel, A.J. Pollock — good but not great power. And his sprint speed has fallen off the map, to the point that he was 292nd in that measure last year. But, interestingly enough, Benintendi had the best solid contact rate of his career last season. Perhaps the combination of his personal best exit velocity and highest launch angle will produce a return to good but not great power, with a good batting average. THE BAT X gives him a .468 slugging, better than any other system, and eight homers along with four steals.

Nomar Mazara

He hits .260 with 20 homers like every year. We have a sample of over two thousand major league plate appearances, and he hasn’t really deviated from that outcome in any season of his four. He’s not good defensively and he hasn’t once been league average with the bat. Why can’t I quit this dude? Well, he’s 25 years old, his floor is established, and there are hints of upside in his batted ball metrics (plus, he’s apparently been hiding a thumb injury for the past season-and-a-half). The best Barrel rate of his career (10.7%), for one. Another is that his hard hit angle has gone from 8.6 in 2017 to 7.8 in 2018 all the way up to 12.7 degrees in 2019. He’s slowly figuring out how to up the launch angle on his hardest hit balls, and any further growth there could bring you great power and run production returns, with some improved batting average upside as well.

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Luke Voit

Give me all the shares of Luke Voit. Going as the 18th first baseman (and 192nd player overall) in the NFBC, on average, Voit offers a unique combination of skills, demonstrated results, and age that you can’t usually find at that point in a draft. He’s 29, so he’s not young, but he’s going among some of the old men at the position like Edwin Encarnacion and Daniel Murphy. Last year, even with the internal injury, he ended up with a top 25 Barrel rate (13.2%). In a smaller sample the year before he had the kind of Barrel rate that could lead the league (20%), so we know what it looks like when he’s healthy and hitting well.

Lewis Brinson

If Luke Voit has a bit of a contact problem that tempers his upside, Lewis Brinson has that… and also a patience problem, and also a lack of demonstrated major league results. On the surface, his career .110 isolated slugging should be enough for removal from any list like this. And, honestly, his Statcast numbers aren’t great either, or weren’t last year. In 2018, he managed an 8.7% Barrel rate that would put him barely top half of the league. THE BAT X thinks Brinson can put up a .159 ISO, which isn’t quite average (.187 last year!) but it might be enough to get him in the lineup, where he might be able to add some steals. If a full-season pace of .230 with 15 homers and 10 steals is interesting in your leagues, Brinson still has some value as a late pickup.

Matt Beaty

Beaty stole five bases last year, but it looks like an aberration rather than something predictive. And though he makes a ton of contact, THE BAT X also doesn’t think he’ll have league average power. Add in the fact that Beaty has to muscle his way into a meaty lineup to matter in fantasy this year, and he’s even deeper of a deep league sleeper than Brinson. There is a bit of a reward, though. Should Beaty be able to put up a league average slugging percentage again, he’d be in a small group of players with a strikeout rate under 14% and better than average power. You’ve heard of the rest of the group: only DJ LeMahieu, Ketel Marte, Marcus Semien, José Ramírez, Anthony Rendon, Jeff McNeil, Alex Bregman, Yuli Gurriel and Michael Brantley managed the feat last year. For what it’s worth, there are more than a few late bloomers on this list.

Brandon Drury

Real life concerns are really messing with the arrow on Drury. The fact that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is going to start transitioning to first base means there’s a decent up arrow next to Drury’s name, as he’s likely to share third base with Travis Shaw in some manner. Then again, he was put on the IL without any additional information, so it’s possible he’s come down with COVID-19. Then again then again, he was put on that IL almost two weeks ago, suggesting that if it was the coronavirus, then he might be returning to action shortly. The highest launch angle and Barrel rate of his career last year means that Drury looks likely to return league average power with a meh batting average, making him an interesting depth piece in deep leagues with daily transactions.

(Top photo: John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

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