Changes to the Baseball in 2022 (And What To Do About It In Fantasy)

Offensive production has been down quite a bit early on in the season, and there has been plenty of grumbling about the state of the baseball, including from some Major League players. At the time of this writing, the league triple-slash line (AVG/OBP/SLG) sits at .232/.306/.370 and we have seen a significant reduction in homers from what we're used to seeing.

I wanted to dive into the data from 2022 and recent years to see if we can find out what may be behind this shift. There are plenty of other possible explanations besides just the change in the makeup of the baseball, things like weather, humidors being in every park, and the shorter spring training we had this season.

Let's take a look at the data and see what we find and identify some key risers and fallers in 2022 fantasy baseball.

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Triple-Slash History

Note: we are completely ignoring the 2020 season in the following analysis

Here are the league-wide slash lines from the last four seasons:

You see a big shift after the 2019 season, as things came way down in 2021 and now have come down even further in 2022. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, however, since we have only seen games played in the early, colder months of the year. Looking at only games played in April, here's what we find:

We don't see a big difference in batting average or on-base percentage there, but the slugging percentage stands out. Another thing that is notable is that strikeouts are actually down a bit (24.5% in April in 2021, 23.0% in April this year), so that is not driving the lower slugging percentage whatsoever, and that number is right on pace with what we saw in 2018 and 2019 as well.

Fly Ball Performance

The big difference I have found in the numbers is how fly balls have performed this year. We're still looking at just data from April to control for the colder temperatures, but here are some stats on fly-balls over these last four seasons.

Fewer than 13% of fly balls have gone for homers this year, while you can see that number being several points higher in each of the past four full seasons. That's a pretty striking number there and does indeed suggest that the ball is flying differently this season.

Barrel Performance

What you see here is that barrels are down a bit from last season, a lot from 2019, and a bit from 2018 – but there are no huge differences there. What is much different is how often those barreled balls are going for a homer. We got used to seeing a barrel go for a homer about half of the time, but now that's down to 41%. Barrels are also traveling less far on average, down a whole five feet from a year ago and eight feet from what we saw in 2019.

The data does confirm the idea that the balls were "juiced" in 2019, and then were changed prior to the 2021 season. It would seem that either the baseball or the presence of the humidor (or both working together) have taken this to a new low, and it is indeed much tougher to hit a home run this season than in years past.

I also took a look at all fly balls hit above 100 miles per hour and checked their average distance traveled:

We see the same trend here, way up in 2019 and way down in 2022 while 2021 and 2018 pretty much match.

What To Do About It

#1 Re-Calibrate Our Expectations

I think it's safe to say that batting average (and thusly, OBP) will be on the rise over the next couple of months as the temperatures warm up. However, without a change to the baseball (the humidors certainly aren't going anywhere this season), I would expect a new low in league-wide batting average. That means that a guy hitting .230 is no longer a crater to your batting average.

I would expect the league batting average to finish around .240 this year. That figure will increase in fantasy leagues since the really bad players aren't rostered, but you should be feeling just fine about anybody hitting above .240 on your fantasy team – and anybody managing .280 or better should be considered elite.

#2 Prioritize The Big Boys

It's going to take more exit velocity to clear the fence this year than in recent memory, which means we will see homers be more and more concentrated among the guys with high bat speed. To help you with this, I've put together two searchable data tables (one for 2021, one for 2022) that show the average exit velocity of fly balls for every qualified hitter. I limited it to hitters that hit at least 50 fly balls last season, and at least 10 so far this season.

Names To Consider

Adolis Garcia is an interesting example of this. You might think that since batting average will be lower league-wide, then his low batting average won't be hurting you as much. That is only true if his batting average doesn't come down by the same percentage as the rest of the league. I imagine that guys like him probably won't be hurt quite as much given the fact that they hit their fly balls harder, but they will by no means be immune to the change. I wouldn't go crazy upgrading those types, but I would upgrade them given the fact that their power production is more likely to sustain.

Here's a list of hitters I would be looking to acquire given the changes to league context: Adolis Garcia, Rowdy Tellez, Hunter Renfroe, Joey Gallo, Christian Yelich, Rhys Hoskins, Jesus Sanchez.

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