The Hitter Stats I Look At
Welcome to the briefest lesson in any course I have written as part of RotoAcademy. You’re looking forward to reaching the repeatedly-mentioned Lesson 4, after all (which, admittedly, is not a course that purchased stock in “brevity”), and I’m looking forward to getting you there. So let’s get you there by passing through this short tunnel: The Hitter Stats I Look At.
K%
This one is simple: the less a hitter strikes out, the likelier he is to be consistently valuable for us. Of course, there is a balance here, as most power hitters also have high strikeout numbers. Do we then simply choose to avoid all home-run hitters in cash games, in order to create more safety for our teams? Absolutely not! (Of course, in Lesson 4 — no surprise there — we’ll take a closer look at exactly how you do want to balance the risk of strikeouts with the upside of power). But what you need to know for now is this: the more often our hitters put the ball in play, the better this is for us.
As always, of course, you cannot simply look at a hitter’s K% on the surface. You have to look at a hitter’s splits (which can be found under the “Splits” tab on a hitter’s Fangraphs page, but, let’s be honest, did I really need to tell you that?) in order to know what a hitter’s strikeout expectations are against a pitcher of the handedness he will be facing.
Remember: splits matter! We don’t need extra words in this lesson just to create extra words (even though we all know that I like words), so I’ll go ahead and lay a blanket statement over all the stats I’m about to mention: splits matter! Pay attention to splits for K%, and pay attention to splits for each of the following stats as well.
To read the rest of this lesson, you must purchase the course!
