Bad Luck Hitters by Batted Ball Metrics

April 27, 2021

Jon Anderson identifies early buy-low candidates for 2021 fantasy baseball based on batted-ball stats. These hitters are underachieving compared to expected Statcast metrics.

Last week, we went into some detail here about how Statcast classifies batted balls and what implications those classifications have. In this post, I want to use some of that knowledge to look into luck factors and find some potential buy-low and sell-high hitters.

As we are about to turn the page to May, we are to the point where a fantasy manager's patience may be running thin with a struggling player. It's never easy to buy low on a player after two weeks of bad play, but after you've completed a month, it gets a bit easier. The same is true the other way around, as a four-week sample of great on-paper production weighs pretty heavily on the mind.

So let's peer into the data and find some players that are over-performing in the box scores based on the kind of contact they have been making.

Bad Luck Barrels

Let's revisit the scatter plot from last week that breaks down these six categories of batted balls by launch angle and velocity:

Your barrels are in light green there, they are all hit above 97 miles per hour at a pretty narrow angle range. This year, barrels have resulted in a .745 batting average and a 2.486 slugging percentage. It is pretty rare for an out to be made on a barreled ball. Here is the "bad luck barrel" leaderboard, which shows the hitters that have had the least luck on their barrels. I've included the bottom 25 names here so you can flip through the pages there to see the exhaustive list. I restricted this to only hitters with five or more barrels.

Brian Anderson is the last remaining player with five or more barrels and not a single hit recorded on them. Trevor Story is also a notable name there. He had a big Sunday, including a grand slam, but for the year he has been quite unlucky with his seven barrels, with just one going over the fence, three going for doubles, and three being long fly-outs.

All of the names above require patience. With the exception of Enrique Hernandez, they all have really strong barrel rates and should start seeing more balls fall into play.

What I did above is similar to what Statcast does when calculating expected wOBA. That is a very helpful metric to determine which hitters have been lucky or unlucky. Here is that leaderboard as things currently stand.

Batting Average Expectations

Now we will shift our focus to more batted balls, we're looking at categories four, five, and six from above. These batted balls have collectively gone for a .630 batting average. Here are all the hitters that have a batting average below .500 on these batted balls.

There are a lot of fantasy-relevant names on this list. The most promising names here are Hunter Dozier, Ian Happ, Ozzie Albies, Kyle Tucker, Keston Hiura, Nick Senzel, Freddie Freeman, Andrew McCutchen, and Eugenio Suarez. They all are under-performing in batting average quite a bit and are great guys to see about buying low on.

What I did above is very similar to the expected batting average metric that Statcast cooks up. Here are the 30 least-lucky hitters by that metric.

It's not always easy to buy-low on a player, as most experienced fantasy managers know better than to jump ship after just a few weeks (and lots of managers will already know the information you just read), but it can never hurt to try. I would be buying a lot of the names above right now.

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