With the candles burning out from the Valentine's Day festivities (for me, it was because my power went out) and catchers and pitchers soon to be reporting to camp, we know that drafting season is about to accelerate. In other words, it about to get real, and with that, the savvy player must get serious about player valuations for the 2015 season.
While Lou Blasi, Sky Dombroske, Michael Waldo, and our team of analysts at Fantistics are happy to give our take on what we see in store for 2015, underneath all of the prognostications is the software, providing us with a firm basis in moving forward. Today, amongst other topics, we are going to discuss zone control (also known as plate discipline) for hitters--how often a hitter swings at pitches, both inside and outside of the zone, and how often he makes contacts with those pitches.
Alongside the batted ball data, including speed and distance, zone control statistics provide powerful ingredients for our player projections and valuations. Below I've included all nine statistics provided by Fangraphs/BIS--OutsideZone-Swing%, InsideZone-Swing%, Overall-Swing%, OutsideZone-Contact%, InsideZone-Contact%, Overall-Contact%, Zone%, First-Strike%, and SwingingStrike%--and from the universe of qualifying hitters, highlight six players' deltas across those categories from 2013 to 2014. Two of them we like to return a profit (Cespedes and Headley), two of them we see struggling to return value (Bautista and Byrd), and two of them (Ortiz and Rollins), to our reading of the data, look to be aging quite well. We'll talk about these on the show in terms of which ones the software emphasize and how, as well some additional applications with player valuations for 2015. So be sure to catch the show on Sirius 210/XM 87 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.. And if you haven't already done so, take the free demo of the Fantistics Software for a spin around the block!
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