First Pitch - Sabermetric Tuesday - August 26, 2008

Looking At Recent Trends and Playing The "Hot" Hand

If you play in head-to-head leagues, this column is for you.  Of course, rotisserie leagues can find value in it as well.  However, it is mostly intended for those H2H players looking for that streaky player that can help them win in weekly match-ups throughout the fantasy playoffs.  Because pitching can be so volatile from start to start, I decided to strictly look at offensive production.

For most leagues, Fantasy Week 22 marks the final week to prepare your team for the upcoming playoffs.  As you all know, you can go a full season dominating your entire league, but unless your team continues to click in those final few weeks, you can fall short of winning the championship.  Yes, much of fantasy success in H2H leagues is a product of the luck factor, but you can minimize the chances of "bad luck" with a simple strategy of playing the "hot" hand.

There are hundreds of ways you can define "recent success."  After giving it much thought, I decided to go with a simple analysis of looking at the top-50 players in the entire MLB universe sorted by 5 statistical categories: Batting Average, OPS (On Base Percentage + Slugging Percentage), HR/PA rate, Stolen Bases, and finally FPI (Fantasy Production Indicator).  To qualify for my list, a player had to have at least 3.1 PA for every game played by their team for the last 28 games (or approximately 85 plate appearances).  And, as always, I have included every player's statistics from that time frame and it can be found here: MASTER DATA.

BATTING AVERAGE

Its no secret that the sabermetric community considers the batting average statistic as over-rated, but that doesn't mean it has no value.  A quick look at the top-5 in average:



OPS

While batting average is looked down upon by true baseball statisticians, OPS is looked at a true measure of a player's overall ability.  Its a blended average of a player's ability to get on base and produce runs (whether by scoring them himself or driving them-in through an increasing slugging percentage).  Here is how the Top-5 shake out:



HOME RUN / PLATE APPEARANCES

I typically write about Home Run per AB rates during our daily player profiles, but I figured a plate appearance comparison would be more appropriate given the limited sample size of games (just 28 for this analysis).  Top-5 looks like this:



STOLEN BASES

Self-explanatory category, but I include it in this analysis just in case you're looking for speed.  A couple of shocker's have cracked the top-5, but it may be best to look at the master data to see some of the attempts at caught-stealing as well.

Player	Stolen Bases	Position / Team
Willy Taveras	16	OF / Rockies
Grady Sizemore	9	OF / Indians
Matt Holliday	8	OF / Rockies
Johnny Damon	8	OF / Yankees
Chone Figgins	8	3B / Angels

FPI

Last and certainly not least, the FPI.  This is the mother of all fantasy metrics established by our very own Anthony Perri.  A full description the statistic's derivation can be found here.  I have ranked the master data by FPI, but the top-5 include:


While these top-5 lists just give you a snap-shot of hot players in the game, the Master Data can give you the specific data you want for anyone who has played the game this season.  I hope this analysis helps your playoff efforts.  Good luck.... -- Joe