Fantasy Baseball Statcast Review: CJ Abrams, Brice Turang, Tyler O’Neill

CJ Abrams is on a heater, Brice Turang can’t stop putting the ball in play and Tyler O’Neill is still barreling everything.

We’ll key in on these three players in our Week 5 Fantasy Baseball Statcast Review.

Fantasy Baseball Statcast Review

CJ Abrams (SS – WAS)

Abrams is off to a hot start in Washington. The former No. 6 overall pick is among the league leaders in sweet spot percentage (97th percentile). That, combined with his above-average barrel rate, has most of his Statcast profile lighting up red all over.

One thing to remember about x-stats (xwOBA, xBA, xSLG) is that these stats and percentiles are simply a description of what has happened, not any indication of what will continue to happen in the future.

To understand that, we need to dive deeper into Abrams’s batted ball profile to understand which, if any, changes in his trends are statistically significant and likely to stick around.

Batted Ball Profile

Taking a peek at Abram’s batted ball profile by month from 2023-2024 we can see that the pull field exit velocity saw a significant change in September of 2023 after some very lackluster results during July and August. Thus far, to begin 2024, we’re seeing that power carry over.

Now, the power to centerfield hasn’t been there (yet), but he’s shown a history of being able to hit the ball hard straight away in the air.

Hard Hit Air Balls

Control charts are one of my favorite tools to use when assessing change with a hitter. They let you look at a metric over time – in our case, hard-hit flyballs – and look at it through the lens of “Are we seeing statistically significant change, or is this a blip?” by bounding the metric with standard deviations.

We’re looking for sustained outcomes that are now better than the player’s average by a couple of standard deviations. What we see with Abrams is a consistent high-exit velocity outcome when pulling the ball in the air. This is consistent with our look at his batted-ball profile. The other encouraging outcome is that his power to centerfield has been consistent, with over 40% of his batted balls in the air being hard hit.

Now, this is a far cry from someone like Shohei Ohtani (71%) or Matt Olson (65%) but Abrams is showing solid game power everywhere but to the opposite field.

Takeaway

Abrams has been decreasing groundballs and increasing his high-velocity flyballs consistently since his rookie campaign. He does look to be coming into his own during the 2024 season, and this may be your last chance to try and buy Abrams. If you can find someone looking to deal him during a perceived hot stretch you may be able to cash in long term on the young superstar in the making.

Brice Turang (2B – MIL)

The two things being discussed regarding Brice Turang are his speed (96th percentile) and his whiff/strikeout rates. He’s making contact with everything and lowered his strikeout rate down to 15% to start the year. As a result of his sprint speed and well-placed batted balls, his BABIP is clocking in at .356 – not out of line for someone with his speed.

Is “New Turang” for real? Can he keep his K-rate this low? All signs point to yes.

Let’s visit his control chart for his strikeout rate:

Control Chart For Strikeout Percent

I see a lot of positive movement here for Turang. The upswings in strikeout rates have all but disappeared since the beginning of 2023, when he was still getting his feet wet. I think we’ll see Turang settle in around that 15% mark and continue to be a valuable contributor on the basepaths.

Takeaway

Turang has made significant changes to reduce his strikeout rate and put more balls in play. He’s never going to be an exit velocity darling. Yet, during these stretches where he’s hitting the ball hard on the ground through the infield and using his legs to beat out anything he doesn’t hit hard on the ground, we’ll see him continue to contribute useful stolen base totals while being a batting average and on-base asset to your fantasy teams.

Tyler O’Neill (OF – BOS)

You want to believe in Tyler O’Neill. Especially if you’re one of the lucky managers to begin 2024 with him on your roster. His Statcast profile runs red with the blood of a .712 SLG and .670 xSLG to begin the year.

What’s changed? Is this an age-28 breakout season?

Batted Ball Profile

Let’s get O’Neill up there alongside our statcast 100th percentile darlings for sweet spot percentage (Freeman) and average exit velocity (Olson). For Statcast purposes, O’Neill wasn’t a leaderboard qualifier, but he did log enough at-bats for a meaningful sample size to analyze his profile in each of the last two years.

The first thing to note is that his batted ball profile for 2024 is still rounding into shape. We’ve got a few weeks before those numbers start to stabilize at a statistically significant level. That said, we can see O’Neill has power to all fields, just not quite on the same level as Olson when it comes to hitting the ball in the air to straight-away centerfield.

He’s not going to run a sweet spot percent like we see with Freddie Freeman, so we can expect that to collapse a bit as his batted ball profile settles in. Still, he does get enough good balls in play to continue to do damage at a 30+ HR clip. The key will be limiting his strikeout and whiff percentages, which are generally ranked right around where you’d expect for a power-hitting corner outfielder.

Takeaway

As you can see, O’Neill is a streaky player in terms of controlling his strikeout rate. We can see the oscillation rather than improvement (like we saw with Turang). Right now, O’Neill is hot, seeing the ball well and putting it in play at premium launch angles with his excellent raw power.

So long as he’s healthy and has the playing time locked down, I think you can bank on a career year from O’Neill, and you should continue to see him near the top of the statcast leaderboards. I wouldn’t sell high on him. I’d ride it out and know there’s going to come a point where you see his sweet spot percent percentile decline rapidly and his K% come back down closer to the 10th or 20th percentile.