Fun With Small Sample Sizes - Fantasy Reflections

We’ve talked plenty about the fact that it’s still early in the season, almost exclusively in the context of remaining calm and exercising patience. Enough of that stiff upper lip crap.

Let’s take a moment to revel in the loony numbers gifted to us by small sample sizes. Maybe they’re indicative of a tangible change in approach or ability. Probably they’re just noise. The only thing we can say definitively so far is that they’re bizarre.

What follows is a collection of some of my favorite wacky early-season stats in 2018.

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April Weirdness

First up, a table:

The HR column makes the identity of Player B a dead giveaway, but Player A is Didi Gregorius’ season line so far, prorated to the same number of games as Barry Bonds’ 2001 campaign. Gregorius currently has a higher slugging percentage than his career OPS entering the season. He’s walking once out of every five trips to the plate after walking once every 25 plate appearances the two seasons before.

(waits patiently for you to return from 10 minutes spent staring, mouth agape, at Bonds’ player page)

Welcome back! Here’s another table:

This one’s less obvious. Player A is Clayton Kershaw. No real surprises there, right? Looks like a Kershaw kind of line. Player B, though? You guessed it, Frank Stallone Joey Lucchesi. The Padres’ rookie has allowed just one run in his last three starts, one of which came at Coors Field.

Jed Lowrie has as many home runs as Mike Trout and more than Aaron Judge, Paul Goldschmidt, J.D. Martinez, Miguel Sano, and all but four other major-league hitters. It’s amazing what a guy can do when he finally gets a little sleep.

Tim Anderson has already drawn seven walks in 63 plate appearances after walking just 13 times in 606 PA last season. He’s on pace for 70 free passes, which would almost equal the number of walks he’d worked in his entire five-year professional career including the minors. Of course, he’s also pacing toward the first 80-steal season in MLB since 1988, when both Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman accomplished the feat.

Over the last two seasons, Jean Segura had a lower pop-up rate than all but 10 other qualified hitters. He currently leads the majors with a 35.3 IFFB%.

Billy Hamilton has a 40.5% soft-contact rate. Only eleven other batters are even at 30 percent or above. How y’all feeling about that top-70 pick you spent?

Two players currently have a BABIP starting with a zero: Randal Grichuk (.091) and Logan Morrison (.094).

Through four starts, Chris Sale and J.A. Happ have each struck out 31 batters in 22 innings of work.

Alex Cobb has a 3.14 WHIP. $57 million buys a lot of pie.

Lance McCullers has allowed only eight fly balls through four starts. Three of them were home runs.

Bud Norris and Keynan Middleton each have more saves than Aroldis Chapman, Cody Allen, Sean Doolittle, Raisel Iglesias, or Kenley Jansen. Thou shalt not pay for saves.

Adam Ottavino has pitched 10.2 innings and is tied for second in MLB in pitcher wins.

Baseball is wonderful. For crying out loud, Bartolo Colon almost threw a perfect game against the defending champs! This would have been, by a wide margin, the least likely thing to have ever happened.

Managing your team intelligently often requires ignoring the significant amount of noise in early-season data. That doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate the insanity. They call it “small sample size theater” for a reason, after all. Enjoy the madness. We’ll be here all season to help you navigate it.

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