Fantasy baseball: Twins Miguel Sano and other BABIP outliers
By Gavin Tramps
Minnesota Twins third baseman Miguel Sano is having a breakout year. Is it sustainable or is he just lucky?
BABIP is a favorite metric of fantasy baseball players trying to look beyond traditional box scores. The acronym stands for Batting Average on Balls In Play and helps to determine whether the player is enjoying a stretch of good luck or has been unfortunate with balls not falling for hits.
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that. The speed of the player, the quality of contact and the defense playing against them, all contribute but the biggest factor is the player’s own career BABIP.
As recently as last week, Minnesota Twins Miguel Sano had a BABIP of .467. To demonstrate just how much of an outlier that is, in the first half of last season, only two players had a BABIP above .400.
Brewers shortstop Jonathan Villar enjoyed a breakout season in 2016. It was fueled by a .410 BABIP before the All-Star break. In the second half, his BABIP dropped by 82 points, but it was still well above the league average. Interestingly, his BABIP has dropped even further this year to .294.
When patrolling the outfield for the Rangers last season, Ian Desmond suffered from an even greater drop. In the first half he had an unsustainable .402 BABIP which plummeted to .287 BABIP in the second half of the season. As you would expect, Desmond’s batting average followed the pattern by dropping from .322 before the All-Star break to .237 afterwards.
Miguel Sano
If we accept that for all of its flaws, BABIP is a useful indicator of good luck, then Minnesota Twins Miguel Sano would appear to be having more luck than anyone. His .467 BABIP led MLB. It was a full 90 points above his career average and a staggering .167 points higher than the Twins average from 2016.
Over the last week, Sano’s BABIP has dropped and Yankees’ outfield Aaron Judge’s BABIP has increased, to the point where they are both tied for the MLB lead with .432.
It seems inevitable that Judge will suffer some regression as the season progresses, especially when his league-leading 39% HR/FB rate drops towards the MLB average of 10%.
Some players, like Starling Marte, DJ LeMahieu and Odubel Herrera, have consistently high BABIP. They can leg out infield grounders for a single. That’s not a skill you generally associate with 6-foot-4, 260lb third basemen or 6-foot-7 outfielders.
Sano is a hard-hitting slugger, so when he makes contact, the ball stays hit. Maybe Sano is in the same class as other high-BABIP stars like Mike Trout (.360 career BABIP), Paul Goldschmidt (.355 career BABIP) or Miguel Cabrera (.347 career BABIP), but we probably need a longer track record to make that judgment.
We should expect Sano to regress during the rest of the season, but even with regression, Sano will be a valuable fantasy producer for the remainder of 2017. Whether you sell high on him now must surely depend on what is offered.
I don’t have shares in Sano in any of my leagues if I did I would trade him for A.J. Pollock, Josh Donaldson or George Springer. If offered Brian Dozier, Jose Abreu or Christian Yelich, then I think I would pass.
Ryan Schimpf
So if we accept that certain players with an unsustainably high BABIP compared to their career mark or skill set, are likely to regress backward, then there must be players at the opposite end that are set for an improvement over the rest of the season.
The Padres’ third baseman Ryan Schimpf has just been demoted to Triple-A after hitting .159 this year and striking out 35% of the time. The league-worst batting average was fueled by .146 BABIP, the lowest of any qualified hitter. In fact, this is such an outlier that he was the only hitter with a BABIP below .200 until Kyle Schwarber slipped to .197 BABIP at the weekend.
The 29-year-old is an all-or-nothing player. He only has 26 hits this year and more than half of them have gone for home runs. The 14 long balls that he has launched puts him on pace to eclipse the 20 he hit last year, but only if he gets a quick recall back to the majors.
Schimpf is a flyball hitter like no other. He leads MLB with 64.4 FB%. Before this season, only one player in the last five years had posted a flyball rate over 60%, and that was Ryan Schimpf last year. All he needs to do is put more balls in play (and this is likely with some positive regression), and he will greatly boost his fantasy value.
Before his demotion, Schimpf was 7% owned in ESPN leagues (19% in CBS and 22% in Yahoo) yet led all second basemen in home runs.
Buy low candidates
Hunting out players with an outlying BABIP compared to their career rates helps find buy low opportunities.
Cardinals Matt Carpenter has been the model of batting average consistency with .272, .272, .271 over the last three years. This season, Carpenter is hitting .223, fueled by .245 BABIP, the lowest of his life and significantly below his career average of .307. It will change.
Orioles third baseman Manny Machado is another player with a 2017 BABIP more than 70 points below his career average. The 24-year-old has 12 home runs with 27 RBI but is only hitting .213. It is likely that his .223 BABIP will move upwards towards his career average of .297.
Like Machado, Anthony Rizzo was taken in the first round of fantasy drafts this year but is struggling to produce first round value. The Cubs’ first baseman has 13 home runs, 36 RBI and a batting average of .247. His .235 BABIP looks unsustainably low compared to his career average of .293 BABIP.
Dexter Fowler had a career year in 2016 and his skill set has always resulted in a high BABIP. Over nine seasons in the big leagues, the Cardinals’ outfielder has a .325 BABIP. This season, it has dropped to .257 BABIP with his batting average and on-base percentage sitting at career lows. It is possible that the 31-year-old came into the season overvalued, partly enhanced by this World Series participation, but now Fowler looks like a buy-low candidate.
Throughout his time in the minors, Cubs’ outfielder/catcher Kyle Schwarber benefited from a high BABIP, ranging from .328 in High-A, .365 in Double-A and .500 in Triple-A. Since the Padres optioned Ryan Schimpf, Schwarber now leads MLB with the lowest BABIP of .197. This is nearly 100 points lower than last season, so look for significant improvement as his luck evens out as the season continues.
Other players with 2017 BABIP significantly below their career average include Todd Frazer, Andrew McCutchen, Mike Napoli, Yasiel Puig, Mookie Betts and Rougned Odor.
Perhaps these are all buy low candidates, but if you are in a league where you can buy low on Betts, you probably need to find a better league to play in.