With the xwOBA stat now publicly available on Baseball Savant, my job just became a whole lot easier. If you don’t know what that is, here’s the long version. Essentially, the stat looks at exit velocity and launch angle for each batted ball, removing defense from the equation, and calculates the players’ expected wOBA (weighted On Base Average) from those.

By taking the difference between a player’s xwOBA and their actual wOBA, it becomes easy to find those who have been lucky or unlucky. Of course, just as with any other statistic, it’s not perfect, and it’s also easy to find for anyone in your league who cares to look. So while I may reference it often in the future, it will only be part of the reason why a player is over- or under-valued.

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Buy Lows

Matt Carpenter (1B/2B/3B – STL)
Carpenter’s always been known for having a high walk rate (and consequently a high OBP), posting rates in the double digits every season of his career. This year is no different — his 17.2 mark is 10^th highest in all of baseball right now among qualifiers and would be the highest mark of his career for any full season. It’s no fluke either, as he’s swinging at a career-low 17.8 percent of pitches outside of the strike zone, second-lowest in the majors. His walk rate has kept his OBP high at .376, and when his .275 BABIP regresses toward his career average of .328, you might even see that number rise above .400 as his average returns to the .270 range.

Carpenter’s strengths don’t only lie in his plate discipline, though. According to StatCast, he’s made improvements in terms of exit velocity and launch angle.

That combination has worked wonders for Carpenter’s xwOBA (.404), ranking him 16^th in that statistic out of the 211 players who have seen 250 pitches His xwOBA-wOBA is 20^th in that group, so he can expect some improvement on his current wOBA of .358 in the near future.

Gary Sanchez (C – NYY)
Yes, I’m aware that Sanchez is injured. That just means his owner might have forgotten how much of a stud this guy is. Given, his sample size over the past two season is still incredibly small, but if you were willing to buy in at the beginning of the season, there’s no reason you shouldn’t now (I say as my freshman year English teacher rolls over in her grave).

Sanchez may have gotten off to a slow start, but his one home run in five games actually puts him on a pace for 32 in a 162-game season, so the power wasn’t as bad as it seems. As for his other struggles, his BABIP can take most of the blame. He hit just .133 on balls in play despite having the second-highest average exit velocity (96.5 mph) among players with at least 10 balls in play. What’s more, that exit velocity is up nearly four miles per hour from last season (92.7 mph), and his average launch angle is more than double last year’s number (16.7 degrees in 2017, 7.9 in 2016). All that has led to a .370 xwOBA, more than 150 points higher than his actual wOBA of .214.

Now that I’ve written 200 words about an injured player, let me point out one last thing. Again, it was only five games, but Sanchez had shown improved plate discipline in that limited sample — his 26.8 swing percentage on pitches out of the zone is actually better than league average, while he’s swung at pitches in the zone more than 20 percent more often than in 2016.

Sanchez might be back for this weekend’s series, so now is the time to buy if you want to get him at a discount.

Nick Castellanos (3B – DET)
If you’ve followed Castellanos as closely as I have the past few years, you’ll know he’s been a favorite of those who value line-drive percentage. He only had 447 PA last year, but his line-drive percentage of 25.6 would have ranked 10^th among qualifiers. This year, that number’s at 31.4 percent, second among qualifiers.

The other thing people knew about Castellanos was that he hit the ball hard. Last season’s 35.7 hard-hit rate would have ranked 55^th among qualifiers. This year, that number’s at 57.1 percent. He leads all players in that category. His average exit velocity is 93.5 mph. That ranks fifth among all players with at least 50 balls in play.

So, Castellanos hits line drives, and he hits the ball hard. What else does he have going for him? Ah, yes, he hits second in the Tigers lineup when everyone’s healthy, behind Ian Kinsler and ahead of Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez. His xwOBA of .399 indicates his .336 mark will likely rise, and he’ll be a run- and RBI-producing machine when it does.

Kenta Maeda (SP – LAD)
Someone smarter than me recently wrote about Maeda’s struggles so far this season and how to fix them, but while that piece focuses mainly on how he can improve, I want to mention here about how he’s actually been pretty good this year regardless. That’s easy to tell just looking at the numbers — his ERA is 6.58 and yet his xFIP is 3.85. A 20.0 HR/FB rate stands out, as that number should regress and see Maeda allow fewer home runs.

Even on non-balls in play, Maeda hasn’t exactly been getting killed. His strikeout rate is within one percentage point of last year’s number, and with his improved walk rate, his K-BB% and K/BB are both up this year. As people who have read me before will know, I am a big fan of contact rates, and Maeda is excelling there this year. He’s given up contact on just 70.7 percent of swings, 11^th best in the league among those who have at least 20 IP, while his swinging strike rate of 14.3 percent ranks eighth in that same group.

Don’t let his struggles against offensive juggernauts Arizona and Colorado sway you — this guy is still a top-25 starting pitcher.

Sell Highs

Jeremy Hellickson (SP – PHI)
Looking at Hellickson’s numbers, you’ll see the exact opposite trend that you do with Maeda’s — a 1.80 ERA is supported by a 3.63 FIP and 5.26 xFIP. His 9.6 strikeout percentage is laughable, and his 2.6 percent walk rate is unsustainable.

More than that, Hellickson’s BABIP stands at just .196 while he’s stranding 86.2 percent of runners that he allows to reach base. His HR/FB rate is less than half his career average, suggesting significant regression there as well.

Honestly, you don’t have to look too deeply at the numbers to see that Hellickson is an obvious sell high. It’s only telling you what you already know in a different way, but Hellickson’s xwOBA of .330 is more than 100 points higher than his actual wOBA of .226. That’s the largest difference of anyone who’s thrown at least 200 pitches.

Ryan Zimmerman (1B – WSH)
I seem to be the only one not on the Zimmerman bandwagon. Lest we forget, this is a player who finished with a wRC+ of 67 last season and 107 the year before. Obviously, no one thinks he’ll keep his 243 number, but there are people out there who think he’s back to being in the upper tier of hitters.

I just don’t see it. He’s currently running a BABIP of .448, which will inevitably come down toward his career rate of .311. He’s also not walking more than he has in the past, and he’s striking out at the same rate, so I don’t view his OBP gains as sustainable even when his average drops. A lot of his success seems to stem from his increased contact rate on pitches outside of the zone, which would be the highest of his career. Since his contact rate on pitches inside the zone has shown no improvements, it’s hard to see that as anything but a small sample size fluke.

His power will also go down, as no one sans Eric Thames is capable of putting up an HR/FB rate north of 40 percent. All that leads to an xwOBA more than 100 points lower than his actual wOBA and a perfect sell-high opportunity.

Ivan Nova (SP – PIT)
Just a quick note on Nova, which I think will be a relief to you after reading (or not, no judgment) everything above. He just threw a Maddux, which is a complete game shutout with fewer than 100 pitches. People are probably pretty high on him right now.

However, for the season, Nova’s walk rate is 0.8 percent. If there’s one thing I’m certain of, it’s that he won’t finish with a rate below one percent. He’ll start walking more batters soon, even if it’s only one or two per game, and combined with his inability to strike out batters, that will drive up his ERA.

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Brian Reiff is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Brian, check out his archive and follow him @briansreiff.