2024 MLB Outlier Data Points 1.0
Digging into outlier data points to spot potential buys and sells for fantasy baseball.
Most of what you get here is scheduled, semi-automated posts that come out on a schedule. Daily notes in the morning, slate previews in the afternoon, and not much else during the season.
But I used to write this post series for RotoBaller, and I want to bring it back because I think it’s really fun and can be really informative and interesting when done right.
What I’ll do here from time to time is point out a handful of statistical outliers in the 2024 MLB data, talk about what makes the data point an outlier, and what is likely to happen to that data point in the future. You’ll see how it goes quickly. This will be functionally useful as a “buys and sells” article for fantasy. Each outlier will be likely to regress toward the mean, and that’s either good news (buy) or bad news (sell) for that player (or players).
Outlier #1: Garrett Whitlock’s K%
We know that there is a very strong relationship between SwStr% (the percent of your pitches that generate a whiff) and K% (the percent of batters that you face that you strike out). Here’s the relationship visualized using 2023-2024 data:
You can see the dots form pretty close to a straight line. As your SwStr% goes up, so does your K%. SwStr% will stabilize earlier than K%, so we can use SwStr% after just a few starts to predict K%.
Here’s this year’s plot, looking only at pitchers with at least two starts and 25 batters faced:
What you see here is Garrett Whitlock really far away from that trend line. All of these dots will tend to be pulled closer to the trend line as we collect more data, which is bad news for Whitlock and his 31% K%.
Through two starts, his has the fourth-lowest SwStr% in the league at 6.6%. Here is everybody under 7% along with their season K%:
Jose Quintana (5.3% SwStr%, 17.0% K%)
Miles Mikolas (6.4% SwStr%, 16.4% K%)
Kyle Hendricks (6.5% SwStr%, 14.0% K%)
Garrett Whitlock (6.6% SwStr%, 30.8% K%)
Logan Webb (6.8% SwStr%, 20.1% K%)
Michael Soroka (6.8% SwStr%, 9.4% K%)
Cal Quantrill (6.9% SwStr%, 14.7% K%)
The good news here is that the 6.6% SwStr% is going to come upward. Last year, he posted a 13.4% SwStr%, a pretty strong number. That translated to a 24.5% K%, which would fall pretty close to that trend line.
So the point here isn’t so much to say “sell Whitlock”, it’s just to point out that you shouldn’t be excited about his 31% K% right now, because it’s not backed up at all by his SwStr%. He will need to raise that SwStr% above 12% to be a consideration for fantasy purposes, and I wouldn’t really be comfortable starting him until we see that come to life.
Here’s a little table of what should be generally expected with each SwStr% range:
7-9% SwStr%: 17% K%
9-11% SwStr%: 19% K%
11-13% SwStr%: 23% K%
13-15% SwStr%: 26% K%
15-17% SwStr%: 29% K%
17-19% SwStr%: 32% K%
Outlier #2: Cristian Javier’s HR/9
About 16.4% of fly balls (as judged by Statcast, FanGraphs will show a different number) go for home runs. This number will vary in different ballparks, of course, but over a full sample you should expect something pretty close to 16% for all pitchers, there really isn’t much they can do to control it outside of the park environment.
Only one pitcher has given up more fly balls so far (data coming from before April 10th) than Javier’s 19, that’s Nestor Cortes at 20. Here are the top ten in terms of fly balls surrendered:
Notice that they have all given up at least one home run, and more than half of them have given up multiple. Javier is the lone man at zero.
He was in the top ten in fly balls given up last year as well:
And the HR/FB for him landed at 12.4%, which is way below the league average. Minutemaid Park is a pretty good place to give up fly balls as long as they aren’t hit to left field. Here’s a spray chart plot to show that, it’s Javier’s fly balls allowed since 2023:
You have one of the shortest porches in baseball in left-left field, but everywhere else is pretty deep. Left center to right center is really deep, and right field is about neutral. So maybe Javier can manage another 14% HR/FB or so, but given how many fly balls he gives up, there is going to be a lot of damage done against him in this regard.
His 39% FB% since 2023 is the highest in baseball among pitchers with at least 15 games started. And his K% over these last two seasons is a league-average mark of 23%. So it’s not like he’s striking out a third of the batters he’s facing to limit the number of balls being put in play here that make up this denominator.
Javier has a 1.10 ERA and a 5.43 SIERA right now, so it’s a good idea to try to ship him away for a mid-round SP return or better.
Some guys on the flip side of this so far (very high HR/FB allowed who should improve moving forward):
Outlier #3: The Cruz’s BABIP
I’m lumping in Elly De La and Oneil Cruz together here.
Elly…: .293 AVG, .455 BABIP
Oneil: .304 AVG, .429 BABIP
Both of these players
Hit the ball extremely hard
Run extremely fast
Are left handed (Elly is switch, but that means 70% of his PAs are lefty)
All three of those help generate a high BABIP. A ground ball hit harder is more likely to get through a hole, foot speed helps you beat out infield hits, and starting your sprint from the left-hand batters box is an advantage as it is closer to first base. We should expect both guys to post a BABIP above .340 this year in my opinion, but nobody should be expected to cross .400 over a significant sample.
Both of these players are having trouble early on lifting the ball.
2023-2024 data plotted here:
Elly has the bigger problem with this, and also a bigger sample. His career GB% now is 56%. He’s hit .267 on his 151 career ground balls, and the league average isn’t much below that at .248.
Expected batting average does a lot of the work for us here:
Elly De La Cruz: .220
Oneil Cruz: .238
I think we’ll see Elly’s current 38% K% come down a handful of points, and the GB% is unlikely to stay as high as it currently is either, so I’d expect something like a .250 batting average from him. That not only hurts him in the batting average front, but it also puts him on first base a lot less which results in fewer steals. The walk rate is 7.5% for him in his career, which is below the league average as well.
I think both guys are decent sell-high’s right now, and that’s not saying I don’t believe that they can be fantasy studs right now. I just think you can actually get a really nice return for both guys given the hype and upside, and right now is a pretty great time to do it while their batting averages are really high.
That’s it for this edition. It’s still a little early to really do this right, so I’ll call it here. This one will just set the stage so you know what you get in this series, please leave your comments and criticisms below!
Love the archetype of this article. Keep em coming