Later-Round Category Targets - Batting Average

Of all of the fantasy sports, a baseball league using category scoring is the one most requiring manager strategy. You can draft a team full of players that overperform their draft cost but still not win your league if you don't fill up the categories correctly.

If I had to give one piece of advice to newer fantasy players out there, it would be to focus very closely on the categories your league uses and learn who in the player pool can contribute to those categories all throughout the draft.

In this series, we will take each category one at a time and highlight some great draft targets to help you out at all levels of the draft, beginning with batting average. You can also read other articles in this series for my breakdowns of other later-round category targets series.

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Where Does Batting Average Come From?

The lazy way of projecting batting average would be to look at a player's batting average from the previous years and maybe also give their BABIP a look and adjust slightly from there. There are, of course, much better ways to go about this. One way is to find which more granular statistics are predictive of batting averages and then give those a good look.

I took a bunch of statistics and saw how they correlated with batting average. Here are the winners.

Contact Rate on Swings

You can't get a hit without putting the ball in play! You can see the trend above, as contact rate rises, typically so does batting average. Five players have contact rates on swings above 90% over the last two seasons:

You can see there in the case of Sogard that a 90%+ contact rate does not guarantee you a great batting average. There is more to the equation than this. But before we go there, here are some other names that have really high contact rates over the last two seasons.

Tommy La Stella (89.9%), Michael Brantley (89.7%), Nick Markakis (89.9%), Anthony Rendon (88.0%), Martin Prado (87.7%), Daniel Murphy (87.7%), Kevin Newman (87.0%), Mookie Betts (87.0%), Alex Bregman<97.0%), Wilmer Flores (86.8%), DJ LeMahieu (86.6%), Andrelton Simmon (86.6%), Jose Ramirez (86.3%), Hanser Alberto (86.3%), Yuli Gurriel (86.2%)

Line Drive Rate

Every batted ball is classified as one of four things based on the angle: a ground ball (less than 10 degrees), a line drive (between 10 and 25 degrees), a fly ball (between 25 and 50 degrees), and above 50 degrees (a pop-up). Taking each one of those categories at a time, here are the league batting averages on each:

So yeah, if you want to hit for a high batting average, you're going to want to hit a lot of line drives.

Contact rate on swings is most correlated with batting average as an individual statistic, but line drive rate comes in second. Here is that relationship visualized:

Here are the line drive rate leaders from the last two seasons:

Speed

The third item under the batting average hood is foot speed. This manifests in infield singles. The quicker you get to first, the higher chances you have to get a hit. The quickest way to look up baseball's fastest players is to check out the sprint speed leaderboard over at Baseball Savant.

For this analysis, I took it one step further and checked the batting average on groundballs (balls hit at an angle under 10 degrees) for every player. Here are those leaders:

There are three exceptions here with Solano, Romine, and Arenado not being fleet of foot, but the rest of those guys are real burners.

The relationship here isn't nearly as strong as our previous two categories, just because speed only comes into play on a small subsection of batted balls (ground balls that stay in the infield).

You can be the fastest guy in the world but if you aren't making high rates of contact and/or hitting all your balls directly up in the air, your speed isn't going to do you any good.

What About Exit Velocity?

It seems intuitive that how hard you hit the ball would have an effect on your batting average, but that does not actually turn out to be the case.

There is no correlation between these two categories. I think the reasons for that are these:

1. The guys hitting the balls the hardest also tend to be slower
2. Sometimes a hard hit ball can actually reduce your chances of a base hit (a line drive that makes it the whole way to an outfielder, a ground ball at a fielder that gets to them much quicker)

Put Them Together

We have three significant variables, and we can put them all into what is called a linear regression model to make predictions on what batting averages to expect. I did just this using Excel. Here are the top 20 highest predicted batting average players over the last two years along with their actual batting averages.

Lots of spots taken up by players that are obviously not worthy of being rostered in standard leagues, so if we filter this to only the top 300, these names enter the top 20 in predicted batting average: Alex Bregman, Tommy Edman, Salvador Perez, Michael Brantley, Jose Ramirez, Ketel Marte, Lorenzo Cain, Trent Grisham, Yuli Gurriel

Standouts

I try to finish posts with concrete advice. Here is some of that.

• Myles Straw seems like an awesome late-round pick for batting average and steals
• Luis Arraez is basically free, which isn't right for someone who could easily lead the league in a category your league is using
• Nick Madrigal is sure to post a high batting average but is unlikely to do much of anything else given his lack of power and spot in the batting order (he hit ninth last year), but at least he's young enough to have some "unseen upside"
• Anthony Rendon looks like a really nice value after pick 40. Even if he doesn't ever quite return to 2019 form,  you can feel good about getting a nice batting average and some RBI out of him.
• Dylan Carlson and Ke'Bryan Hayes are young players I'd be willing to invest in given their line drive abilities

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