In this space each week I’ll take a look at which teams, as a whole, are trending up through the lens of of our advanced stats. Understanding which teams are hitting the ball hard, and whether they are producing or not, is a great way to determine which lineups may lend themselves towards stacking. Now, it should go without saying, but each individual matchup needs to be evaluated on a daily basis. So while the players highlighted in this article may be hitting the ball particularly well, their inclusion in your lineup will ultimately come down to their specific matchup with the starting pitcher on any given day. To aid you with this process, be sure you’re checking out the free Lineups page and — for our subscribers — the Player Models page.
As you may or may not know, this season I’ve been writing a Stack of the Day article, focusing on potential targets, or fades, within a day’s slate of games. Moving forward, I’m going to be switching this up a bit. What I’m hoping to do is extract the value of these daily articles and condense them into this new, weekly article. I’ll still be focusing on the use of many of the stats and trends you may have become accustomed to, but instead of applying them to an individual day, I’ll be looking at the state of the team as a whole. And in particular, the recent performance of the core of the lineup.
Houston Astros
The Astros may not have the most alluring schedule from a ball park perspective over the upcoming week — they have a series in Seattle followed by a three-game tilt in Oakland — but what they do have is a trio of hitters that are really on their game right now.
Jose Altuve (bats out of the leadoff spot), George Springer (2nd) and Colby Rasmus (4th) have all been hitting the cover off the ball over the past two weeks, all placing within the 90th percentile in terms of Exit Velocity Differential. Couple this with the fact that all three also place in the 80th percentile or above in terms of Distance Differential and Hard Hit Differential and it’s obvious they’re keyed in at the moment. To quantify what this means in terms of expected production for a player, let’s fire up the Trends tool.
Matchups aside, you’re gaining a solid +0.67 DraftKings points, on average, by rostering players with such credentials. Throw on a wOBA split filter to assure you’re rostering the player in a positive matchup based upon the handedness of the pitcher, and the Plus/Minus bumps up to +0.95. With Rasmus’ slight reverse splits, this means targeting this trio against left-handed pitching. Depending upon how the rotations work themselves out over the coming days, such a matchup may manifest itself in the form of Rich Hill of Oakland. When he’s on, Hill can mow down hitters with the best of them — as evidenced by his two double-digit strikeout games already this season — but a WHIP of 1.53 through four games also speaks to his vulnerability.
Regardless, this lineup is hitting the ball well right now and their matchups — and assumingly low corresponding Vegas totals — should make them ripe for tournaments as a lower-owned contrarian option.
St. Louis Cardinals
The Cardinals are another team that has a number of players displaying signs that their on-field play may be trending up. Matt Carpenter (bats leadoff), Brandon Moss (3rd), Matt Holliday (3rd), and Matt Adams (4th) all place within the 80th percentile in terms of Distance Differential Score.
There are a number of reasons to love the Distance Differential metric, but one of the reasons I really like it is that it does a great job of quantifying the luck factor. At the end of the day, there really isn’t that much difference between two deep outs to the warning track and a couple of home runs. If we have a slight wind blowing in on a particular day or the ball park dimensions just didn’t align well with where the player had hit the ball, what would have been a couple of long balls in the majority of parks now amounts to zilch.
So if we take a group of hitters from the top half of a lineup that have been thriving in terms of the Distance Differential metric and place them in a hitter’s park, those deep outs might now squeak over the fence. Makes sense, right? Well according to the Trends tool, yes, yes it does.
Factor in the expected temperature for the series against Arizona — the forecast has the temps at game time ranging from 70-80 degrees — and this looks like a prosperous situation for stacking purposes.
A small sample size, but an average Plus/Minus of +1.96 is certainly exploitable.
Of the four batters mentioned above, you’ll generally only see three of them starting on any given night, depending upon matchup, so be certain to confirm who is projected to start in advance.
The nice part about the Cardinals’ series against the Diamondbacks is that it coincides with a series at Coors. So despite the likely high projected run totals by Vegas, the ownership levels from these players should be held in check as players gravitate to various Coors-heavy stacks.
Ideally, we’d look to stack this team against righties, as the majority of the lineup have positive wOBA/ISO splits against them. Because the splits line up well for this team, it should be easier to mix and match pieces from this lineup if you’re looking to differentiate away from a standard 1-5 or 1-4 stack.
