Spring training and the World Baseball Classic are rapidly approaching. Both will offer baseball fans and fantasy gamers an opportunity to enjoy games and analyze box scores and stats.
Some folks will incorrectly caution people that spring training doesn’t matter. Others will overreact to every home run or strikeout, which is also an incorrect approach. While stats in spring training don’t matter for fantasy baseball, and players have differing motivations in the spring, keeping tabs on what’s happening in the spring can pay dividends for astute fantasy gamers.
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Spring Training Stats That Matter
Walk & Strikeout Rates
Walk and strikeout rates are interesting to keep an eye on because of how quickly they stabilize. As Piper Slowinski wrote for FanGraphs back in 2010, walk rate stabilizes in approximately 120 plate appearances, and strikeout rate does so around 60 plate appearances.
A young hitter with limited experience in the Majors sporting a sky-high strikeout rate in spring training can be treated as a red flag for their early-season outlook. Conversely, it’s less alarming for a veteran with an established track record of more palatable strikeout rates.
A pitcher boasting a bloated strikeout rate in the spring can be viewed as a plus. Yet, it’s also critical to recognize the span of players getting playing time in the spring. Teams will trot out players ranging from minor leaguers who aren’t ready for The Show, fringe Major Leaguers hoping to latch onto a roster, to superstars. The same is true for hitters as well.
Without knowing the context of the level of competition pitchers and hitters face in spring training, even strikeout at walk rates should be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, eye-catching walk and strikeout rates for pitchers or hitters can serve as a jumping-off point for digging in deeper on those players.
Batted Balls
Gamers should also keep tabs on batted-ball rates in the spring. Line drives take a long time to normalize, but ground balls and fly balls don’t take too long. If a pitcher who traditionally hasn’t coaxed ground balls is generating them at an unexpectedly high rate in the spring, it’s worth digging into why that change might be occurring. For instance, did they add a sinker or a ground-ball inducing pitch to their repertoire?
If a hitter with raw power but a propensity for hitting worm burners is suddenly launching fly balls for homers, they could be a breakout candidate to hit more round-trippers in the regular season. In addition to groundball and flyball data being available, gamers can take a more granular look at batted-ball data, namely at Baseball Savant.
Baseball Savant tracks launch angles and exit velocities. Not every spring training venue or World Baseball Classic venue captures those things, but some do. Being ahead of the curve on a hitter lifting their launch angle can lead to scooping up or drafting a game-changing hitter.
For instance, after Christian Yelich was traded from the Marlins to the Brewers, he increased his launch angle and hit the ball harder and instantly set a new career high for homers and won the National League MVP Award in 2018. If batters are generating higher exit velocities than in the previous year, hitting the ball at a higher launch angle or, ideally, doing both, gamers should file that hitter’s name away.
Repertoire & Pitch Characteristic Changes
Every year, there are reports of players entering spring training in the best shape of their lives, and those reports are usually met with laughs and jokes. That’s not the only spring tradition, though.
There will also be reports of pitchers tinkering with their repertoires in the spring. For instance, Roki Sasaki has reportedly been working on a cutter and a two-seamer. Adding pitches to a repertoire can help a pitcher close a platoon split by finding an answer for the handedness of a hitter they struggle with.
For example, if a right-handed pitcher struggles mightily with left-handed batters and leans almost exclusively on a four-seam fastball and slider, news of them adding an effective changeup to neutralize lefties could help a pitcher take a step forward.
There are almost always reports of pitchers entering spring training throwing harder, too. Sometimes, those pitchers spent the offseason working with trainers at places like Driveline Baseball to tweak their mechanics or change their training to throw harder. Pitchers adding velocity to their heater can help them miss more bats with their fastball or increase the effectiveness of their secondary offerings if batters must take the fastball more seriously.
Velocity isn’t the only characteristic that can change for a pitcher’s stuff that makes an impact on their ability to mow down batters. They could also change their arm angle or tinker with the break on their breaking balls. Fantasy gamers should stay on top of pitch velocity and repertoire changes news during spring training, ideally finding data to support the claims, either in articles from beat reporters, tweets and posts on social media or through the info available at Baseball Savant and FanGraphs.
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Josh Shepardson is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Josh, check out his archive and follow him @BChad50.
