In spring training, you’ll often hear or read analysts handwave stats away as meaningless. Frankly, that’s incorrect. However, there’s a lot of noise in spring training statistics. So, it’s better to dismiss them than put too much stock in them.
Nevertheless, there’s a happy medium. The key is to understand what you’re looking at and how to weigh the value of the statistics. Obviously, players have different goals in spring training. For instance, some players are fighting for roster spots, and established players might be tinkering with a new pitch or putting forth less than 100% effort while building up conditioning. Further, spring training rosters include youngsters getting a taste of big-league camps that aren’t ready for the biggest stage and the game’s top stars. As a result, the statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt. Again, however, there is something to glean from the statistics if viewed through the proper lens. Finally, stats that stabilize quickest are the most useful.
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Walk and Strikeout Rate
The final sentence of the intro was a perfect segue for this section. In 2017, David Schoenfield tackled the topic of the relevance of spring training stats for ESPN. He cited a 2015 study from The Economist editor Dan Rosenbeck. Specifically, Schoenfield and Rosenbeck mentioned spring training walk and strikeout rates having more predictive value than box-score stats like batting average and ERA.
Intuitively, their findings make sense. Piper Slowinski has analyzed walk and strikeout percentages for hitters and pitchers for FanGraphs. For the former, Slowinski said it takes about 60 plate appearances for a hitter’s strikeout rate and 120 plate appearances for a hitter’s walk rate to stabilize. In addition, Slowinski said, “you don’t need more than a few dozen batters faced to get a sense of how good a pitcher is when it comes to strikeouts and walks.”
Thus, the small samples created in spring training are suitable for analyzing walk and strikeout rates. Mike Podhorzer also added another wrinkle to spring training walk and strikeout rates for regular-season expectations. He demonstrated through his research that incorporating spring training walk and strikeout rate with a projection model (he used Marcel) can help identify breakouts and busts.
Hitters
In recent years, you’ve probably heard MLB broadcasters and read MLB analysts discuss launch angle ad nauseam. Unfortunately, launch angle data isn’t widely available in the spring. Still, good ol’ fashion ground ball and fly ball data is available on MLB’s spring training stats landing page in the form of ground out to air out ratio. It doesn’t take long for ground ball and fly ball rate to stabilize.
So, a surge in fly balls for a hitter might indicate more home run potential for the regular season. Further, I’ll search for information about a player changing their hitting mechanics in the offseason if their fly ball rate sores in the spring. Players like Justin Turner and J.D. Martinez have made the leap from fringe big-leaguers to elite hitters with offseason swing changes. Predictably, not every swing change has led to superstardom. For instance, after overhauling their swings, Yonder Alonso and Daniel Vogelbach have only had fleeting success. Still, the success stories for hitters that altered their launch angle and batted balls make this a statistic to track in the spring and into the early part of the regular season.
Pitchers
Again, walk, and strikeout rates are the spring training stats I’m most interested in for a pitcher. However, seeing a surge in strikeout rate or reduction in walk rate can lead down a rabbit hole of useful information. For example, it might reveal news of a pitcher adding velocity, changing their mechanics, using a new pitch, or abandoning an inefficient pitch.
Therefore, I’m taking some liberties in this section. Regardless, velocity is a tangible measure that fits the spirit of this article. Additionally, a pitcher changing their repertoire by addition or addition through subtraction can have a seismic impact on their fantasy outlook. Thus, that’s the information I care about the most for pitchers in spring training.
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Josh Shepardson is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Josh, check out his archive and follow him @BChad50.