MLB Trendspotting: Thursday, May 17th
Welcome to a very random (and even cooler) edition of the classic 2017-era article “Trendspotting.” This article was designed as a daily look back at recent trends using the latest and greatest in advanced stats. The idea was that if we can understand “why” faster than our opponents, we can gain an edge.
If you are a newer player or don’t dig into the numbers… this next part is for you.
wOBA. ISO. wRC+. OPS. OPS+. K%. K/9. BB%. BB/9. WAR. BABIP. wRAA. GB%. FB%. LD%. IFFB%. XFIP. SIERA. Oswing%. FF. FT. FTSI. CUKC. Soft%. Med%. Hard%. SwStrk%. FStrike%. EV. Launch Angle. Distance. xWOBA.
Those are the baseball stats we casually toss around like it’s kindergarten reading material. It’s not. It’s complicated stuff. That’s why I created the Trendspotting scoring system last year, so I could boil it down and present you with a single number representation of the matchup. That’s also why we took that idea and made it a billion times better with PlateIQ Premium Ratings this year. We wanted to give newer players something that could hang their hat on while learning the game. We want to give you time to learn about the numbers and what they mean before you get squashed by the sea of nerds, accountants, scientists, brainiacs, numbers guys, and other degenerates who are experts in understanding these analytics already. After all, they are competing against you daily DFS.
Based on the PlateIQ Ratings, I’ll dive into the numbers and find you trends you can use both today, and in the future to understand player performance. Let’s fire up PlateIQ and some other sites like baseballsavant.com, Brooks Baseball, FanGraphs, and any other baseball analytics source we can find to see what we can uncover.
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