A Look at Recent Bad Luck Hitters
Examining slumping hitters that shouldn't be slumping.
Let’s go back in time and imagine that it’s April 18th again. We look at the wOBA-xwOBA leaderboard and see this:
Francisco Lindor: 85 PA, .151/.259/.319, .231 wOBA, .333 xwOBA
Lindor owners were enraged, exasperated, ready to drop him! But given that wide gap in the xwOBA and wOBA, the sharps knew he would turn it around. And if we look at the numbers since April 19th:
212 PA, .265/.316/.490, .806 OPS, 10 HR, .350 wOBA
Now, not every every hitter with a huge differential like Lindor immediately turned it around. Christian Encarnacion-Strand had a .243 wOBA on his .334 xwOBA in the season’s first three weeks, but he would go on over his next 47 PAs to post a .227 wOBA before exiting (probably for the year) with injury.
The general rule is sound though, xwOBA-wOBA is a great tool for judging what to do with recent slumping hitters.
For the Python bro’s out there, I went ahead and coded a whole function here to get us some luck data from whatever recent time frame we want. Do I want the last two weeks?
The last one week?
The last 30 days?
PRETTY COOL RIGHT!?!? I could almost just end the post right there!
But I won’t! Let’s dive into some of these names.
Alec Bohm
It was looking for awhile there like Bohm was on his way to easily post a career year.
On May 11th, Bohm was sitting with a .343/.406/.538 slash line on a 16% K% and four homers, good for a .945 OPS. Since May 12th, however:
119 PA, .211/.252/.349, 2 HR, .601 OPS
That has cratered his season OPS to .797 and frustrated many a fantasy owner. But under the hood, things aren’t so bad.
K%: 11.8%
Cont%: 81.5%
Hard Hit%: 48.0%
Brl%: 10.2%
xwOBA: .370
He is well above the league average in Barrels/PA at 8.4% (league average = 6.3%), and his .370 xwOBA is in the top 25 in the whole league over this time.
Bohm is a spray hitter, he’s never been a guy that is pulling a bunch of fly balls, which is why he’s been a middling power hitter even with some barrels. Here’s a look at his 2024 spray chart looking at just hard hit fly balls:
He’s a lower HR/Brl guy, but the good news is that a non-homer barrel is still a rather great outcome, and the infrequency of his strikeouts give him all the more opportunities to add more and more well-struck balls in play.
Even if he gets right, he’s a fringe guy in a 10 or 12 team league, but he’s certainly a fantastic buy-low player right now in leagues of depth.
Christopher Morel
If we just look at the season he’s put up under the hood we would be sure we were looking at a sure-fire all star and fantasy stud. There are only 20 hitters in the league meeting this criteria:
K% < 23%
Brl% > 10%
And of those 20, Morel’s .209 batting average and .400 slugging percentage are both dead last while his xwOBA is much better at 13th-best in that group (.380).
Over the last 30 days, his wOBA sits at .311 while the expected wOBA is way up at .378, that 67 point difference is the fifth-largest in the league.
We’ve been waiting for the bust-out campaign to start pretty all season now. Right from the jump he had shown us that he had monstrously cut down on the strikeouts from his past, and that figured to facilitate a huge bump in production.
But the green line has been above the red line since the first couple of weeks of the season:
The lines are just now starting to meet, and he’s had some success recently with a June OPS of .910 that has come with three homers.
Even with the bad fortunate, he’s managed 13 bombs and seven steals on the year, good for about a 30-15 pace, a solid fantasy season even with a bad batting average.
But the batting average should come up as long as this K% stays around where it is. His xBA sits at .267 currently with a .502 xSLG; there’s a whole lot of red on the Statcast page.
Morel is a great player to buy on, even if you have to pay a pretty significant price. The upside is for him to be one of the most valuable bats in fantasy over the rest of the season.
George Springer
It’s been a really bad season for Springer, who was drafted as a starting outfielder in every fantasy league out there.
258 PA, .198/.287/.295, .582 OPS, 15.5% K%, 10.9% BB%, 5 HR, 8 SB
That performance has gotten him booted to bottom four of the lineup out of his long-time leadoff spot. I personally cut him a couple of weeks ago, and so far he hasn’t made me regret that - but he might be about to.
Over the last 15 days he has a .373 xwOBA with just a 12% K%, but a .225 BABIP has him still hitting just .208/.333/.292 over that time.
The main issue is that the age seems to have taken some authority off of his swing. He has just a 6% Brl% and a higher 52% GB% this year with an average exit velocity more than two points below his recent career averages:
2021: 89.4mph average, 116.4 max
2022: 88.7mph average, 113.6 max
2023: 88.6mph average, 115.9 max
2024: 86.1mph average, 110.9 max
So maybe that’s the real problem here, and if he doesn’t pick that up, things probably won’t get all that much better than what we’ve seen.
For the year, his xBA is right in line with waht we’ve seen previously at .260 (.264 last year, .265 in 2022), and given that he’s still not striking out much, I think it’s fair to expect a pretty decent batting average moving forward. That could go a long way to fantasy relevance with his 12% stolen base attempt rate (three points above the league average). If he can get some base hits to fall in, and steal some bags, he could easily find his way back to the lead-off spot where he could once again be a useful fantasy bat for average+steals+runs.
There you have it, three buy-low names with some detail about their recent misfortunes. There are also plenty of other names in the screenshots at the beginning if you want to dive in for more on your own!
Thanks for reading, I am going to try to write these posts much more frequently for the next couple of months, people seem to appreciate them - peace out!
Loved this article it was a great read and easy to understand