Wow, it’s June already and now we’re into the part of the season where you’ll need to identify short-term trends in under and over-performance in order to reap the arbitrage available to you via trade or roster position rotations. I’m hoping you can walk away from this piece with at least a couple targets to push you through the summer and toward the stretch run. As usual, I’ll be talking a lot about launch angle trends for some hitters and one pitcher and their ability to create or limit damaging contact. If you need a primer, I wrote one of those a few weeks ago and followed it up with a deep dive.

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Positive Regression Candidates

Maikel Franco (3B – PHI)  has been written off by nearly all of the 12-team mixed and under fantasy baseball community – for good reason. In recent seasons, though he maintains a very low strikeout rate, he doesn’t walk all that much and he hits a ton of ground balls, usually of the super weak exit velocity variety. However, this year, despite the still mediocre statistics, his batted ball profile has reverted to what we saw out of the young slugger in 2015.

It’s super interesting to see this because he’s expanded all the launch angle zones where he can do damage, but he’s also paired it with non-elite exit velocity. This includes a vast under-performance on his average on batted balls in the line drive region (8-16°).

I’ll admit, with Maikel Franco it’s not a slam dunk. It’s not even a layup or a free throw, but there’s at least the sign that he’s trying to change. Even with all the ground balls, he’s still pulling a rather large percentage of his fly balls this year (37%), which is where you’d normally find him doing damage to the tune of a 1.200 wOBA, yet this year he’s at a paltry .828 which is below even his low from 2015. I still think there’s upside here and a chance to be a “rich man’s Marcell Ozuna“.

Giancarlo Stanton (OF/DH – NYY) is having an uncharacteristically bad start to the year and his Yankee career. Yes, he regressed to his career normal on his K%, but that’s not the only thing hurting him this year.  His pull rate on balls hit between 16-40 degrees is down to 21% this year from a career Statcast era high of 38% last year. All those balls he was pulling for homers last year are now deep fly outs to CF.

Or think of it this way, his wOBA on pulled fly balls has been ~1.400 for his career. It’s still 1.321 this year, but he’s hitting approximately half as many due to his K-rate and his spray distribution. He had an outlier season last year with balls leaving the park to CF which created a .992 wOBA last year against a career average of .682, so that’s where we were going to expect the regression to come from. But he is Giancarlo Stanton, one of the most powerful humans to hit baseballs, so there’s always the chance he murders every other ball to CF for long stretches. This year just hasn’t been that year.

The thing to monitor with Stanton is his Pull% on fly balls. He’s at a local minimum for sure and nearly an all-time low. For me, this is the buy-low time on the big fella and you hope he starts pulling balls again.

Negative Regression Candidates

Scooter Gennett (2B – CIN) is probably the most obvious regression candidate, but most owners probably don’t realize just how hard the crash is going to be. If you’ve been riding him, I’d probably opt for jumping off too soon rather than too late.

Over-performing on ground ball BABIP? Check. Liners? Check. Fly balls? You bet. He’s run just about as hot as any hitter has ever run hot. Remember, home runs aren’t included in BABIP, so that’s ignoring his extremely high spike in HR/FB ratio which has been driven not by a change in pulling the ball, but in homering on every other ball he’s pulled in the air this year. The bottom is going to fall out fast. He’s still a decent player, but there’s no real change here.

Michael Wacha (SP – STL) has been great to begin the year. A pristine 2.41 ERA despite an increase in BB/9 and decrease in K/9 since last year bringing him to nearly career highs and lows respectively. Wacha’s one true skill seems to be limiting home run type contact during an era where home runs are everywhere. This year, to date, he’s halved his HR rate. Some of it has to do with pure luck against his fastball.

There is one piece of good news on Wacha, though. According to Fangraphs, his change has had a pitch value of 9.9 to start the year. This is backed up by MLB QOP who has his quality of pitch on the change piece at 5.34 this year (Great Quality) vs. just 5.04 (Good Quality) last year. However, they also have all his fastballs grading out worse than last year. This tells me that there is a thin margin of error with Wacha for the remainder of the year. If his zone contact rate on his change-up regresses a little and his swinging strike percentage with it, he could be in for a rough patch with the peripherals he runs out there. It appears to be keeping hitters off his cutter which has lost several miles-per-hour since last season.

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Jim Melichar is a correspondent at FantasyPros. For more from Jim, check out his archive and follow him @JimMelichar7.