Those of you who read FanGraphs, CBS, or writers like Mike Petriello or Tom Tango regularly have heard a lot about Statcast for the past year or two. It has exploded in that time as MLB has made more and more data available to the internet. Much of this data has been available to teams for a while, but now that the public has access to some of this information we are catching up quickly. Petriello and Tango write for MLB.com and much of their job is to organize and make this data accessible. There are a few useful leaderboards that can be found at MLB.com here. Another big cog in this machine is Daren Willman. He runs a website called Baseball Savant as well as working for MLB. This is where much of the Statcast raw data can be found. This is all a huge revolution for the baseball world. Very smart writers are constantly learning new ways to use and analyze the data and I’d encourage whoever isn’t already following these sources to start doing so. Right now I just want to unpack some of what we know now and how we might use it for fantasy baseball.

If you are already familiar with Baseball Savant then you might not need to read any of this. It is all really new to us and I can’t say that I’ve seen any sort of helpful guide on any of the mainstream fantasy sites that explains these things to the regular baseball fan yet. I, myself, am still learning and I’d expect it will still be a few years before we fully understand what we have at our disposal. But for starters, the hub of all this new stuff is the website Baseball Savant. Now this website is fairly basic but don’t let it fool you, there is more complicated information on here than anywhere else.

The three main tools on this site I have found useful have been the Statcast Leaderboard, the Statcast Search, and the individual player pages. The Statcast Leaderboard is basically exactly what it sounds like. It has some of the main statistics all in one group and can be easily sorted high/low for a handful of important metrics. The one’s I’ve found the most useful have been Average Exit Velocity, Average Distance, and Barrels per Plate Appearance. Exit velocity is a quick way to compare how hard a hitter typically hits balls compared to the league. Average distance is a basic measure of how much power the player might be showing in comparison to the league. Both of these are nice as you don’t have to worry too much about knowing what particular MPH or distance is good or bad, you can simply compare it to the league (using the Control-F function is handy here). Then lastly Barrels is probably something you’ve heard or read about. Basically if a player gets a Barrel it means they hit it hard and at an ideal launch angle, leading to a high likelihood of a line drive extra base hit or home run. So Barrel per Plate Appearance is a useful metric to tell you how often a player is hitting the ball really well. All of these stats will usually have big power hitters towards the top of them; players like Sano, Stanton, and Judge. But that’s also what makes it only so useful. Yes this leaderboard is very good at telling me who has power and can hit the ball well, but someone like Sano can look like one of the best hitters in baseball if you only look at these numbers. You wouldn’t know he regularly sits at a 30% strikeout rate and has a batting average around .250 (yes I know he’s done much better this year but you get my point).

The Statcast Search might be my favorite tool out there, other than FanGraphs of course. There are like 30 different inputs you can sort the data for which basically means most people don’t even bother because they don’t understand where to begin. You can sort just about anything you want but 95% of it you won’t need for fantasy baseball. The main inputs you really need to worry about are Player Type, Season, Sort By, and Min At Bats. Game Date start and end are very useful as well if you are looking for any particular split (you will have to select a specific data such as July 10 to October 5 if you want second half splits). Player Type is simply to choose hitters or pitchers, easy enough. Season is also pretty self explanatory, it goes back to 2008. I’m not sure how reliable the older data is but who playing fantasy baseball needs data from that long ago anyway?

Sort By is the important input. This is what you want it to kick back out to you. Most of the items I don’t find terribly useful myself but you can look around for yourself. You can access all of the data from the Leaderboard such as Average Distance and Exit Velocity. What I really love is xBA (expected batting average) and xwOBA (expected weighted on-base average). These are both exactly what they sound like. They incorporate the new Statcast Hit Probability that the fine people at MLB.com have created (explanation). Without going into too much detail (since I am no way qualified to) Hit Probability basically calculates the likely outcome of a batted ball given it’s velocity and trajectory. So xBA tells you what a players batting average should be based on how and where they are hitting it. The full definition can be found here. xwOBA is basically the same idea and what has become my single favorite item available (as defined here). Per the Statcast Glossary: “Knowing the expected outcomes of each individual batted ball from a particular player over the course of a season — with a player’s real-world data used for factors such as walks, strikeouts and times hit by a pitch — allows for the formation of said player’s xwOBA based on the quality of contact, instead of the actual outcomes. Likewise, this exercise can be done for pitchers to get their expected xwOBA against.” If you are unfamiliar with wOBA to begin with, basically it is a super useful, all-inclusive stat for a hitter’s performance at the plate. .320 is average, .340 above average, .370 is great, and .400 is excellent. I’d encourage you to check out the FanGraphs Glossary if you want more of an explanation.

So what we have with xwOBA is a full scale evaluation of how well a hitter has hit the ball mixed together with their actual walk and strikeout numbers. This will tell you as much as perusing an entire FanGraphs player page, incorporating Hard Hit Rates, Line Drive Rates, BABIP, and all the other things you could possibly try to interpret. This only runs hard calculations to know the true probabilities behind how a hitter is hitting the ball. I hesitate to state that xwOBA tells you everything you need to know about a hitter but it’s pretty darn close compared to anything else. So for fantasy purposes you will need to make sense of this information. This obviously won’t tell you how many stolen bases or home runs a player will end the season with, nothing will. This however will definitely give you an idea how well a hitter has been hitting the ball, regardless of luck or the dozens of other variables that could misrepresent a players fantasy value. If you want to get comfortable with this stat, I’d recommend looking at the leaderboard for 2016 and get a feel for which players finished where.

So Baseball Savant was kind enough to take things one step further, they added a metric for xBA – BA and xwOBA – wOBA. This gives you a quick leaderboard of the players that have overperformed or underperformed their expected stats the most. As you would expect players like Carlos Correa and Manny Machado who have gotten off to terrible starts are at the underperformed end of the spectrum, letting you know that they have been hitting the ball just fine but their real numbers don’t show it. Then players like Bryce Harper, Eric Thames, and Ryan Zimmerman, while all genuinely are hitting the ball really well, have even exceeded their expected stats and might be due to come back down to ear a little bit (as no player can stay at their pace for long).

Then the final input I said was helpful was the Min ABs. This is exactly what you’d expect, allowing you to set a minimum at bats so you don’t get leaderboards back with a bunch of guys with a handful of at bats at the top of the list.

One other item on the Statcast Search I’d like to point out now is in the Sort By input you can choose Average Spin Rate. If you’ve ever seen a writer reference a particular pitch’s spin rate this is where you could find it. If you wanted to, say, see which pitcher’s curveball has the highest spin rate, you could select that input here and set the Pitch Type input to Curveball. You might find this useful.

Like I said before, there is more here at your disposal than you could possibly dig into all at once. So I’d start with these particular items as I think they are easily the most useful for fantasy. This is definitely where the future of baseball analysis is headed (and has been for some time) and that means this is also where the future of fantasy baseball analysis is headed.

I know this is getting a bit long winded but I just want to touch on one last tool Baseball Savant offers, the individual player pages. These have just about any and all information you could possibly want on a player. I have found Spray Charts useful in the past. One example being if a player is traded and you want to see how many home runs they might’ve hit in their new park, you can easily overlay their spray chart from a given year onto a different ball park. If you ever want to have fun see how many home runs Brandon Belt would hit if he were in, say, Guaranteed Rate Field instead of that lefty killer AT&T Park (hint, it would’ve been 27 home runs instead of the 17 he did actually hit). Or take 2015 Mike Moustakas out of Kauffman and into Angel Stadium? I’ll let you check it out yourself.

The player pages can also show you a Rolling Average chart on Exit Velocity, if you’d like to see the changes made throughout the season, possibly giving you incite into if you think a hitter might be playing through an injury. Pitch Breakdowns are also handy to see stats based on how a hitter does against different pitch types. There is loads more data beyond these and far more than I have even gotten into myself.

Like I said at the start, this is all very new data and the public baseball writing industry is still learning how to use and analyze it all, and by extension the fantasy baseball world is even a step behind that, learning what might be relevant to our purposes. I hope this might at least be a starting point for you. There is so so much more we have to learn from all this and in another year there will be even more metrics available to us. For the time being, make use of what we have and get the best edge on the competition you can. If you have any comments to add or any questions feel free to ask in the comments section. If you are familiar with this stuff and have your own metrics you’ve found useful that I haven’t mentioned, please let me know as I am still learning myself.