Fantasy Baseball: 7 Hitters Whose Strikeout-Rate Trends Should Have Your Attention
Jonathan Villar, Milwaukee Brewers
Fantasy owners who invested an early-round pick in Jonathan Villar have to be feeling quite uneasy with the early returns. Sure, the Milwaukee Brewers infielder does have seven combined homers and steals on his ledger, but the counting stats are hardly a soothing tonic for the batting average woes that have befallen last year's out-of-nowhere fantasy stud.
It is precisely this limited track record of elite play that makes Villar's current .133 batting average and 35.4-percent strikeout rate so alarming. Let's not forget that, until his meteoric, 62-steal breakout last season, Villar was largely persona-non-grata for standard league fantasy purposes -- a speed specialist at best.
And while we must be careful not to overreact to small samples, Villar's current plate discipline trends across the current season paint a somewhat dire picture of his overall five-year outlook, particularly with respect to swing rate (O-Swing %) and contact rate (O-Contact %) outside of the zone, as well as swinging strike rate overall (SwStr %).
| Season | PA | O-Swing % | O-Contact % | SwStr % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 241 | 23.9 % | 49.2 % | 11.7 % |
| 2014 | 289 | 30.0 % | 49.4 % | 13.8 % |
| 2015 | 128 | 27.4 % | 62.8 % | 10.4 % |
| 2016 | 679 | 24.1 % | 57.5 % | 10.6 % |
| 2017 | 65 | 28.6 % | 47.1 % | 15.1 % |
Thus far, Villar's swings at out-of-zone offerings are up notably, while his success on those swings is way, way down. This sudden decline in plate discipline is a clear catalyst to the ballooned whiff rate, making Villar's current pace look a heck of a lot like his work in 2014, when he hit .209 on a .270 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) for the Houston Astros.
Villar is working with an impossibly low .147 BABIP on the current season, but with his contact trends looking this dire, it will certainly take more than corrected batted-ball luck to dig Villar out of the sub-Mendoza doldrums.
Admittedly, there aren't many actionable conclusions here for the aggrieved Villar owner. After all, there's no selling him, not with rampant regression fears torpedoing his perceived value.
The caution here is for owners on the other side of the transaction -- Villar might seem like a classic buy-low target, especially for owners who struggled to speculate on late-round steals. However, the trends on display here might mark Villar as a fairly toxic asset unless he comes at a major discount. It's well inside the possible range of outcomes here that his tremendous 2016 campaign could very well be the exception, not the new rule.
