MLB Daily Notes - June 15
A daily automated report of what happened yesterday in Major League Baseball, along with other recent trends and further analysis
Check out yesterday’s box scores here
The Daily Notes are the flagship resource of MLB Data Warehouse. Every morning, Jon breaks down the current goings on in the fantasy baseball world, and an automated daily report gets you up to date on key stats and trends. Become a paid subscriber at MLB Data Warehouse to get this unlocked in your inbox every morning!
Back in the basement, back to the real job, back to the daily notes on my mechanical keyboard.
I’m going to fire up the mailbag podcast again today or tomorrow. I’ve taken a bunch of questions on X, but you can also send them through the form here:
I also had TIM and TREVOR both texting me first thing this morning “ARE YOU HOME NOW?”. They’re just begging to be a part of my life again. So we’ll get the machine humming again this week.
Speaking of TIM. I need to be better at promoting the fScores. They are incredible. Long story short, this is an advanced player grading system. To me, it’s most useful for minor leaguers. But there are scores for the Major League players as well. You can find them on the main dashboard. There’s a tab dedicated to it, but they’re also on the Hitter Profiles page for each player. Here’s Chandler Simpson, probably the funniest one out there:
The best place to find them for minor leaguers is via the web app:
Look up a player and see what the fScores tell you. It’s a great way to quickly get to know about what a player can do and what kind of profile they have.
When I met Tim a couple of years ago, he was doing these bad boys by hand. One player at a time with an Excel sheet or something like that. So we put in the work last offseason to automate it, and now a Python script updates them all with just a couple of clicks.
The Vegas games are over now. The Athletics now head back to Sacramento, which is going to feel like a freaking pitcher’s park now. The scores in those games:
15-14 Brewers
7-5 Athletics
4-3 Athletics
6-4 Athletics
7-5 Athletics
23-9 Rockies
Glad that’s over! I’m not sure if they’ll go back there next year, but the new stadium the Athletics will eventually play in won’t be anything like that. The elevation will be way lower and the park dimensions, you’d think, would be less hitter-friendly as well.
Nick Kurtz really liked hitting there. In six games he hit four homers with seven runs, seven RBI, and a 1.417 OPS.
It also got Tyler Soderstrom going with four homers, which is 33% of his current season total.
Soderstrom hasn’t exactly been great this year. His batting average is down to .241 and before this last week his home run rate had been down a lot as well.
The good news is that his xwOBA has been coming up, and that wouldn’t have anything to do with the park. I guess it could have a little to do with the park since the quality of the pitches would be diminished because of the altitude as well.
He has a strong 18% K% on the year but just a .245 xBA with it. I don’t think Soderstrom is anything special for fantasy leagues, but he does have this mixture of contact ability with power that not a ton of guys have.
There aren’t too many hitters who can pull a sub-20% K% with a 10%+ Brl%. Sodey is one of them. Here’s the full list:
This was the original magic formula. Basic, but powerful. We can use it to look at some recent samples of guys doing both things at the same time, and we can keep it under a certain ownership threshold to find hitters to add. Over the last month, we have these five names doing that in at least 90 PAs:
Spencer Horwitz: 16% K%, 13.1% Brl%
Kody Clemens: 17% K%, 11% Brl%
Luis Garcia Jr: 16% K%, 10% Brl%
Curtis Mead: 18% K%, 12% Brl%
Joc Pederson: 15% K%, 12.5% Brl%
More simply, you can just consult barrels per plate appearance, which is right on the main hitter page on the dashboard.
The league average = 6.1%. So that’s a barrel in 6% of trips to the plate league-wide. The league leader is James Wood at 13.4%. Some guys under 50% owned:
Dom Canzone 11.6%
Kody Clemens 9.2%
Heliot Ramos 9.1%
Jesus Sanchez 8.5%
Nathaniel Lowe 8.1%
Cam Smith 8.1%
So Kody Clemens keeps showing up. But there’s no clear breakout hitter I’m seeing here for us to go out and add right away.