Fantasy Baseball: 3 Things We Learned in Week 6

Baseball fans love their stats. We devour them, dissect them, and build our fantasy rosters around them. Each week of the 2021 baseball season, we will be gifted with another statistical sample size of pitches, plate appearances, and playing time. Knowing it often takes hundreds or even thousands of pitches or batted-ball events for trends to normalize, how should fantasy managers adjust to the ebbs and flows of weekly player performance?

Each week during this season, this piece will look at trends that have emerged over the past week and determine if it is signal or noise moving forward. What is prescriptive in helping build winning fantasy teams and what can be ignored as small sample size noise? Hopefully, we can make sense of what has just happened to help us make smarter roster and free agent budget decisions.

Let's take a look at some of the data from the sixth scoring period of the fantasy baseball season.

Keep The Faith With Kyle Tucker

I was asked on a podcast last week what to make of Kyle Tucker's first month of the season. It's a fair question because the counting stats have mostly been there -- Tucker has 6 home runs, 2 stolen bases, 18 runs, and 20 RBI through 34 games. But his batting average is a pitiful .188 and his OPS is a mere .651 (and was .584 before Sunday's game), about 200 points lower than his last two seasons.

When I began digging into the numbers under the hood, this is about as classic a case of buy-low (if you don't have him) or be patient (if you do have him) as one can find.

To start, Tucker's batting average on balls in play is a mere .180. For his career, Tucker is about 80 points above that number and the league average this year is around .285. So we start with some bad luck -- more of the balls Tucker puts in play should start turning into hits soon. But is he actually putting the ball in play enough?

The short answer is yes. Tucker's 80.4% contact rate is the highest of his young career and is more than five percent higher than the league average in 2021. In fact, his swinging-strike percentage, zone contact percentage, and his outside zone contact percentage are all quite a bit better than the rest of the league this year.

Even deeper in the arsenal, there are very encouraging signs that more days like Sunday are coming (Tucker erupted for two hits, one walk, one home run, and four RBI). Here are Tucker's Statcast numbers, courtesy of Baseball Savant.

As you can see, Tucker is in the top 30% of all Major League hitters in just about every category. He could stand to walk a little bit more, but his strikeout rate is much lower than the past two seasons.

I'm especially paying attention to the 80th percentile average exit velocity (EV). Hitting the ball hard correlates to more base hits and home runs, and right now, Tucker is 30th in the league in average EV (91.3 mph), only mere fractions behind someone like Shohei Ohtani (91.7 mph), who has been absolutely raking this year.

Hold tight on Tucker and know that your patience is about to be handsomely rewarded.

Making Sense of Kyle Hendricks

Another Kyle we need to talk about is Kyle Hendricks, who seems to be going in the absolute wrong direction after three seasons of elite ERA, command, and run prevention.

After a stellar seven-inning, one-run performance against the mighty Los Angeles Dodgers on May 4th, fantasy managers were hoping Hendricks had turned a corner on a miserable start to the season, only to be greeted with a five-inning, six-run outing against the Pittsburgh Pirates on Sunday. That marks the third time this year Hendricks has allowed at least six runs in a game, leaving fantasy managers wondering where the player is who has twice placed in the top-10 of Cy Young voting.

To find out where that pitcher is hiding, we probably could start by looking at what happened to his fastball. In 2020, FanGraphs rated Hendrick's fastball as the 12th-most valuable four-seamer in baseball, saving 6.4 runs above average over the course of the season. This year, out of 67 qualified pitchers, Hendricks' fastball ranks 66th, allowing 7.7 runs above average through his first seven starts. That is a drastic shift in primary pitch, but while that may be the "what," we need to also determine the "why."

Typically, the first place to look at in these cases is velocity. His fastball this year has lost nine-tenths of a mile per hour from last year, placing him 216th among all pitchers in that category. But while that's not a great place to be, the 87 mph that Hendricks throws is always among the slowest of all big league starters. His velocity on that pitch has been between 86 mph and 87.8 mph the last five years, so that can't be the only force behind the early decline.

Hendricks has seen a steep drop in his in-zone swing and miss percentage this season, going from 19.5% in 2020 to 16.3% this year. That 3.2% drop ranks 191st out of all pitchers, and can likely be attributed to the location of his fastball (and other pitches for that matter). Consider these two images from Baseball Savant:

The first shows pitches Hendricks throws in the zone to opposing batters. 52.2% of his pitches are thrown in the zone, which is higher than the league average of about 49.8%.

The second image shows pitches Hendricks locates on the edge of the strike zone. Almost 46% of his pitches are classified as being thrown on the edge (league average is 39%). With so little movement on the fastball (Hendricks ranks 288th among pitchers in horizontal movement of his four-seamer), and a relatively low velocity, that many pitches thrown in the zone is likely going to lead to disaster against MLB hitters, and it has so far in 2021.

There have been encouraging signs throughout some of his early starts, but as we get into the hot summer months, Hendricks' pitch selection and location is certainly going to be something to watch.

Add Tyler O'Neill

Tyler O'Neill (39% rostered in Yahoo leagues) - Over the last 14 days, O'Neill has been the 44th-best fantasy contributor for Yahoo rotisserie leagues among all players. His .295 average, two home runs, seven runs, seven RBI, and three steals in that span have his managers dreaming of a 20-20 season. That would be a massive profit for a player who was the 100th outfielder taken in drafts, on average, and the 343rd player taken overall.

While a 20-20 season might be aggressive, projection systems like The BAT and Steamer project O'Neill to hit between 19-21 home runs and steal 7-8 more bases the rest of the year. Considering O'Neill already has five home runs and three steals, a 25-10 season would be absolute robbery considering where he was drafted.

O'Neill is getting the opportunity, and now he just has to keep producing. He played 24 of the St. Louis Cardinals' first 35 games in left field and now has a firm hold on the position, as well as the sixth or seventh spot in the lineup depending on who is catching.

Playing in his prime age-26 season, O'Neill has improved in just about every relevant batted ball statistic, shown by this year-to-year comparison chart, with numbers courtesy of Baseball Savant.

If you are in one of the 60% of leagues where O'Neill is available, and you've lost Christian Yelich or Luis Robert or Byron Buxton for an extended period of time, O'Neill might just be a better-than-expected replacement. He could serve as a strong source of homers and steals the rest of the season.