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December 7, 2012

Resident Fantasy Genius

Valuing Offensive Players in New Homes

by Derek Carty

On Wednesday, I obliged a reader request to go over the various factors that impact the value of a player who is changing teams. We’re currently in the thick of the free-agent signing period, so this couldn’t have been a more topical request. After receiving a lot of positive feedback on my look at the things that affect a pitcher’s value, I decided to look today at the things that can affect a hitter’s value.

Role
The most important piece of the puzzle, if also the most obvious, is role. All else equal, the more at-bats a player gets, the more valuable he’s going to be. For a guy like Josh Hamilton, this is a non-issue—he’s going to start as many games as he’s physically capable of wherever he goes—but for fringier players, this is important. Is the player going to be a starter, a bench player, a platoon player, or will he have to compete for a role? We could be talking the difference between $0 and $15 or $20 here.

Position
This one comes up less frequently but can be important, especially for a guy like Mike Napoli this offseason. Napoli will have catcher eligibility this season in all fantasy leagues but will be getting non-catcher, full-time at-bats while playing first base for Boston (with a few games behind the plate). The difference between being a starting catcher and a starting first baseman can be 100-200 plate appearances. While Napoli was bound to go up no matter where he signed, Napoli accrued just 417 plate appearances last year. He should exceed 600 this year, maybe even approaching 700 (which wouldn’t be the case had he signed somewhere as a catcher). Even for non-catchers, their new position is important to consider as it could cause them to gain in-season eligibility or lose eligibility at their old position in keeper leagues.

League
As with pitchers, I’ve found that hitters perform better in the National League than in the American League, but the effects are rather minimal. While league was perhaps the most important consideration for pitchers, for their hitting counterparts we’re talking a 0.003 point gain in batting average with two extra homers and one extra steal, on average, over the course of a full season.

Ballpark
Particularly for hitters, ballparks are a trickier subject than most assume they are. We can make some general assumptions—Coors Field will help, Petco will hurt—but different hitters are impacted differently by different parks (that’s a mouthful).

For example, HitTracker’s Greg Rybarczyk showed in an old THT Annual that high-power hitters tend to be affected less by Dodger Stadium than low-power hitters. While the fences are deep all around, its center-field fence is actually relatively shallow compared to other parks, and high-power hitters (who generally hit a bunch of their homers to center) will continue to succeed in that regard while their low-power counterparts see more of their balls die on the left- and right-field warning tracks.