On this season’s final Regression Report, let’s take a step back from the hubbub of your fantasy pennant race and look forward to 2018 drafts. These five players all have current-season results that appear notably out of character with their underlying numbers, making them notable regression candidates and thus interesting Draft Day pressure points for next season.
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Mookie Betts owners on the outside of their title hunts looking in are undoubtedly spending the last days of summer pointing fingers at their first-round pick.
Indeed, this young stud’s exorbitant Draft Day cost (he was a consensus top-two selection per the FantasyPros ADP data) is a large part of what makes his good-not-great .265/.342/.441 slash line sting. Even so, Betts is poised to contribute mid-20s in both the homer and steal categories on a batting average that isn’t setting you back. In other words, we’re seeing the low end of his range of outcomes–solid, but unspectacular.
Meanwhile, Betts’ underlying stats remain quite spectacular indeed, with the 24-year-old sporting a razor thin 0.4% K-BB rate, a career best in hard contact (35.1%), and continued excellence in reach rate (a mere 24.3%) and whiff rate (a clean and lean 5.2%).
There might not be enough time to see substantive regression take hold on Betts’ depressed .271 BABIP and 9.2% HR/FB, which might actually be a good thing for Betts investors in 2018.
Look for Betts to regress closer to the high end of his range of outcomes in 2018. He has elite skills and ceiling to burn–take any sort of discount you can get.
Despite his relatively modest 3.66 ERA on the season, Chris Archer’s improvements in strikeout and walk rate this season could very well find the Rays righty in the conversation for fantasy ace status come Draft Day next season, at least among drafters who are reticent to shop in the cream of the starting pitcher pool.
Yet there are some trends in his underlying stats that suggest he’s in line to take a step back in 2018, rather than solidify his ranks among the most reliable frontline fantasy options.
For one thing, Archer, quite shockingly, has tallied the second-highest hard-hit rate among MLB starters, rubbing elbows with such inauspicious company as Alex Cobb, Jordan Zimmerman, and Derek Holland.
Digging in a little further, you’ll also notice that Archer’s grounder rate is down over seven percentage points from last year, with a five-point increase in his liners and near-three-point increase in his fly balls. This trend hasn’t shown up in his homer-per-fly rate, sitting at 13% this year, a slight but welcome regression from the outsized 16% mark we saw last year.
But you have to wonder if the worm might turn once again for Archer in 2018. His reliability in terms of innings and strikeouts provide him a strong floor, but I think I’d much rather invest in him as a high-end SP2 than have to rely on him as my ace.
Matt Carpenter (1B/2B/3B – STL)
Barring a major September hot streak, St. Louis utility man Matt Carpenter will, for the second straight season, finish the year heavy on promise but light on results. Carpenter’s excellent 16.2% walk rate sees to it that his .377 OBP just about matches his .380 mark from last season, but thanks to a career low .439 slugging percentage, his OPS is decidedly mediocre .816, sandwiched between also-rans Tim Beckham and Matt Kemp on the MLB leaderboard.
Carpenter’s .278 BABIP might be the culprit here, enabled by an increased emphasis on fly balls–he’s stroked 49.2% in the air this year, up substantially from last season’s 43.2% mark. In fact, Carpenter’s fly rate has increased in each of his last three seasons, but so too has his hard hit rate, which currently stands at a robust 42% on the season. This would be just barely a career high if we were to close the book on the season at the time of this writing.
In fact, of the 27 players currently touting a 40% hard-hit rate of higher, Carpenter is one of only six to sport a slugging percentage of .440 or below. The others are Miguel Cabrera, Nick Castellanos, Chris Davis, Mitch Moreland, and Wil Myers, a group largely distinguished (with the exception, perhaps, of poor declining Miggy) by their propensity for strikeouts. In other words, these players submit a large number of at bats that produce no total bases, thus adding to the slugging percentage denominator and dragging down the percentage. The non-Carpenter group has an average swinging strike rate of 12.2%. Carpenter’s whiff rate, meanwhile, stands at a lean 5.9%. Something just doesn’t add up.
Carpenter has the results of an all-or-nothing power bat with the skills of a Joey Votto-esque plate-discipline master. Sure, you can argue that his results over the past two seasons show no signs of correcting course, but this seems like betting into an unlikely losing streak to me. If the eligibility-rich Carpenter’s ADP in 2018 starts shaping up at or below his modest top-60 cost going into this season, I’d be investing heavily in a bounce back.
It’s been a tale of two seasons for speedy Phillies outfielder Odubel Herrera, who looked like a mid-season drop candidate after slashing .253/.292/.393 in the first half, only to emerge as a difference maker down the stretch thanks to a blistering .360/.416/.625 run through July and August before hitting the DL with a hamstring strain. Herrera’s recent surge has been so impressive that he’s actually dug himself out of an early-season hole to the point that his overall batting line (.287/.333/.467) looks almost par for the course compared to last year’s surprise breakout (.286/.361/.420).
Well, almost. You’ll notice that Herrera’s shifted some points from the OBP column to the slugging column, and indeed, it’s the recent power boost that has made the 25-year-old Phillie such a distinguished asset down the stretch.
Yet Herrera’s power binge (check out that .274 ISO in August) is pretty clearly a figment of batted-ball luck: his 19.2% hard-hit rate over that same span is 16th-lowest among qualified hitters, while his .429 BABIP is ninth highest. Sure, Herrera’s legs should keep his BABIP floor rather high, but it’s odd to see Herrera opt against showing off that speed on the base paths. He’s attempted only two steals across the past two months of play.
Meanwhile, Herrera remains, despite his stellar results, a serious plate-discipline liability, with a 41.3% reach rate and 14.8% whiff rate this month actually representing a depreciation of his already suspect marks in these categories from his disastrous first half.
In terms of results, Herrera’s range of possible outcomes has been on full display this year, with the young lefty seeming unrosterable at times and indispensable at others. Yet in terms of the underlying stats, he’s been pretty consistently underwhelming. Overeager fantasy owners are often inclined to buy in on a player’s upper range of outcomes, especially if he seems to have stolen-base upside, but in the case of Herrera, I’d let someone else take the plunge.
Since making headlines with his eight-inning shutout of the Dodgers in his first start of the season (all the more improbable given the Dodgers’ impending historic run), veteran lefty Clayton Richard has settled into a passable if quite forgettable fantasy campaign, tallying a 4.96 ERA across 167 innings, with that mark slightly buffed up by a less-glaring 4.36 FIP.
This run of mediocrity has come despite Richard’s robust 59.4% grounder rate, second only to soft-contact maven Marcus Stroman for best in the majors. Combine that with Richard’s eye-popping 20.9% homer-per-fly rate, and it would seem that the 33-year-old southpaw’s results don’t quite jibe with his skills.
Indeed, one glaring miscue here seems to be the results on Richard’s normally terrific curveball, a pitch that has limited hitters to 62 and 55 wRC+ in the past two seasons yet which carried a 114 mark in 2017, thanks in no small part to a very suspicious .385 BABIP on that offering. This comes despite a seven-year-high 39% strikeout rate and career-best 43% reach rate on that pitch.
Richard’s strikeout rate and walk rate have trended in the right direction this year as well, and though his 6.7 K/9 won’t move the needle for too many fantasy managers, the lack of volume Ks should push him down draft boards next season.
Assuming he has a starting job with the Pads sewn up, Richard makes for an interesting late-round investment in 2018. At worst, he’s a spot starter at home, with potential to be an every-week mid-3.00 ERA contributor if the luck on his breaking ball improves.
Tom Whalen is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Tom, check out his archive or follow him @tomcwhalen.
