It’s all in the numbers, and the more you know how to interpret said numbers, the better you can use them to predict the outcomes of your fantasy season and take advantage of others’ ignorance.  So, without further ado or further snooty literary reference, I present to you a list of...

The Top 10 Baseball Stats That Can Help Improve your Fantasy Game (And How To Use Them): 

10 ) K/9, BB/9, K/BB (“The Trifecta”) - All three of these stats serve similar purposes: they’re great ways to measure a pitcher’s “true skill,” as well as predict WHIP and K totals. Strikeouts per 9 (K/9) obviously serves as a good way to predict who will put up high K totals in a season - so far, aces like Tim Lincecum, Johann Santana, and Justin Verlander top the K/9 leaderboard at the moment.  Walks per 9 (BB/9) is another obvious statistic that is underutilized by the fantasy mainstream and helps us figure out who will post high WHIPs and ERAs.  Want to know why Dodgers’ up-and-coming hurler Clayton Kershaw can’t seem to get things right at the Major League level?  His horrific 4.74 BB/9 so far this year is a pretty clear indicator that he’s not getting the ball across the plate enough to limit baserunners and keep opposing teams from scoring.  Throwing these two stats together to make Strikeouts per Walk (K/BB) gives us a sort of index we can use to measure a pitchers ability to limit baserunners.  

9) Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP) - BABIP is becoming more and more common in fantasy writing, but it’s something that can be useful over relatively small sample sizes and large sample sizes as well.  Over a brief period of time (say, a few weeks), one can look at BABIP (for both pitchers and hitters) as a measure of luck - if a hitter is mashing line drives and hard grounders that are just not hitting the right spots, his BABIP may be unnaturally low (league average is around .300) over that timespan; check out his stats and compare his current BABIP to his career BABIP to see if the ball is just not going where it should for a hitter.  The same method works for pitchers, as a large disparity between current stats and league average can show trends of luck over small samples.  Over longer spans (a whole season, or several seasons), it can be an indicator of a pitcher’s ability to induce weak contact (ground ball pitchers tend to have lower BABIPs, like Brandon Webb), a hitters ability to run out grounders (speedsters like Ichiro tend to turn grounders into hits more than a slugger like Prince Fielder) or make hard contact (Matt Holliday, a great line drive hitter, has a career BABIP of .352 because he always hits plenty of liners, for example).  

8) Plate Discipline Stats - Walk Rate (BB%) and Strikeout Rate (K%) - These two stats can often help us divine how well a hitter can manage big league hitting.  Patient hitters who take walks at high rates (e.g. Chipper Jones, who has a career BB% of 14.5)  will force pitchers to throw more strikes (and thus give them a better chance to make quality contact) and get on base more (allowing them to score more runs).  Others who strike out often (Adam Dunn’s career average is an ugly 32.3%) can be prone to hot/cold streaks or prone to putting up downright atrocious batting averages.  Looking at these two stats together can give you a pretty good idea of how well a hitter manages his at bats and what is causing improvements or regression in batting average.  Young players tend to stick well if they can take a lot of walks without striking out too often - hence Cameron Maybin’s struggles with his dismal 36.9% K rate. 

7) Strand Rate or Left on Base Percentage (LOB%) - Strand rate is another indicator of a pitcher’s luck over a given sample - it is, put simply, the percentage of baserunners allowed by a pitcher that do not score.  Better pitchers tend to put up higher totals than average pitchers, so like BABIP, it’s better to compare a pitcher’s strand rate to both the league average and his own career average.  Ricky Nolasco has been a victim of a bad Strand Rate so far - his 52.7% mark is well below both his career average (68.8%) and the league average (usually somewhere near 72%). 

6) Home Runs per Fly Ball Percentage (HR/FB%) - For both pitchers and hitters, this can indicate both luck and skill.  Great sluggers like Ryan Howard (career HR/FB% of 33.2%) post up high totals over long sample sizes, well above a normal number like 10%.  A low number in comparison to a slugger’s career average can be an indication of a power outage, whether brief or long-term.  For pitchers, HR/FB% tends to be more of an indicator of luck than skill, though pitchers who struggle with consistency (Brett Myers comes to mind with his 15.3% career HR/FB rate) can give up more taters than most.  As with other rate statistics, compare a player’s numbers to his career average and the league average to get a good idea of how he’s faring over a given period of time. 

5) Swing/Contact Stats (Z-Swing %, O-Swing %, Contact %) - Zone Swing % (Z-Swing%) indicates how often a player swings when the ball is in the strike zone and is a good indicator of how good a players batting eye is; Out of Zone Swing % (O-Swing%) indicates how often the player swings at pitches out of the zone and serves a similar purpose.  Combined with a player’s Contact % (how often he hits the ball when he swings), these two statistics can help us figure out why a player’s K% or BB% are different from the norm.  Does he swing at every pitch (like Vlad Guerrero) without connecting often?  His K total should be higher.  Does he tend to only swing at pitches that come across the plate and let bad pitches go?  That’s a good indicator for a change in his BB%.  Overall, these numbers help us understand a player’s plate approach, and changes in these numbers can help explain changes in other cats (including BA and the other two aforementioned stats). 

4) On-base Plus Slugging (OPS) - When a stat shows up on ESPN, you know it’s finally hit the mainstream; OPS is there.  While Steve Phillips or Joe Morgan might not care about a player’s OPS (is there a stat that measures a player’s heart and/or soul?), you should, because it is probably the easiest stat to understand of what could be considered the “advanced” batting statistics.  OPS is simply the sum of a players on base percentage and his slugging percentage, and OPS leaders tend to put up the best totals in R, RBI, HR, and BA, as perennial mashers like Manny Ramirez, Albert Pujols, and Alex Rodriguez will post up OPS totals over .900.  Knowing a player’s OPS is a good way to compare one batter to another, as a great hitter will put up a high total by taking walks and hitting for extra bases, while undisciplined slap hitters (I’m looking at you, Michael Bourn) will post numbers in the nether-regions of the .600s or .700s.  Improvement in overall hitting can be tracked in comparison to a player’s career average, and a good way to do draft rankings is to use OPS as a baseline stat rather than batting average or counting stats like R and RBI.

3) Line Drive Percentage (LD%) - The type of contact players make influences a player’s BABIP in a big way, with his Line Drive % being the best way to post both a high BABIP and a high BA.  A line drive is, speaking from a purely statistical standpoint, the best type of contact a player can make (with about 70+% of them landing for base hits).  If a player can put up a number over 20% (like Nick Markakis, who put up a 21.1% LD rate and had a BABIP of .351 last year) will be a reliable producer in BA and typically can drive balls for more extra base hits.  Ask any Phillies fan: there is nothing more beautiful than a Chase Utley line drive Home Run.

2) Isolated Power (ISO) - Isolated power (ISO, calculated Slugging% - OBP%) is a sort of inverse OPS; it tells us how many extra base hits a player puts up, or in general, how good of a power hitter he is.  Like other stats, compare to career averages and league averages to get an idea of whether or not a player is genuinely improving his power numbers or just lucky. 

1)  Weighted on Base Average (wOBA) - if ever there’s been a comprehensive metric of how good a particular hitter is, it’s wOBA, a weighted version of OBP that takes into account extra base hits as being more valuable than walks or singles.  Tom Tango’s The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball goes into much more detail on how this stat is calculated if you really want to sink your teeth into some statistical meat, but in general, it can be used like OPS as a general way to rank hitters based on their ability to hit for power and get on base.  It’s a great baseline stat for pre-draft rankings or for targeting players to trade for. The best players will post numbers in the high .300s or even the low .400s. 

Hopefully you can leverage these numbers to predict trends for both hitters and pitchers.  All of these stats can be found on Fangraphs.com (as always).  

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