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Bold claim: we we want home runs in fantasy baseball.

We know that Brl% is a great indicator of HR%.

So we can do pretty well just by looking at hitters and their barrel rates. There’s not a ton we can do to predict HR% better than that, but it does help a bit to factor in strikeout rate as well.

To go down one more level, and to get to the point, we can use 90th Percentile Fly Ball Exit Velocity to predict Brl% pretty well.

It makes a lot of sense that this metric would predict barrel rate well, because barrels are just very hard hit fly balls.

FB 90th here does decent at predicting HR% to take out that middle man, but it’s better at predicting barrel rates (HR% is a little bit random because certain parks factor into it).

This is not going to the best important analysis piece of draft season. I’m using an inferior metric to project home run rate, but it does remain an interesting metric to look at for a few different reasons.

• It’s not widely cited. This isn’t something you see on Savant pages or anywhere else, so that makes it a little bit more fun and interesting to see

• It does signal potential barrel rate increases for hitters that end up hitting more fly balls. Take the Christian Yelich example, he hits his fly balls extremely hard, but just doesn’t hit a ton of them because of his 55% GB%. If he ever did have a season with a 45% GB%, he would probably hit 30+ homers because we know that those fly balls come off his bat extremely fast. This is the kind of profile we’re trying to spot here, guys that could end up with a lot more homers if they hit more fly balls this season.

It’s pretty simple. We take all of a hitter’s exit velocities on fly balls only, and then find the 90th percentile mark of that. The 90th percentile is the value where 89% of the values are lower than it and 9% of the values are higher than it. So let’s just say we have 10 exit velocities:

90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99

98 is the 90th percentile mark. Here’s Aaron Judge’s fly ball EV distribution from 2023 with that 90th percentile mark shown:

So now we know what it is and we know that it’s quite predictive of power output. Now what we’ll do is look for hitters with:

I took each player’s percentile in both things and then compared them together, and found the biggest differentials:

Mostly here we find hitters with very high ground balls rates. That makes sense since a high Brl% requires a higher FB%, but EV on fly balls is completely blind to ground balls, since it filters them all out from the jump.

It’s pretty rare to see a high GB% guy turn into a high FB% hitter, so let’s filter down to the ground ball rates below 48%.

So we have Akil Baddoo at the top, but he’s not a fantasy player for us this year as he seems destined to begin in AAA and possibly stay there for awhile. Let’s get into some more interesting names to watch for 2024 fantasy leagues.

Many people have written about Bleday this offseason. He is still just 26 and previously was a highly-touted prospect. Between AAA and MLB over the last two years, he has hit 43 homers in 1,041 PAs (a solid enough 24 PA/HR). But he’s managed to slash just .183/.296/.335 in the Majors (541 PA), so there seems to be a lot of work that needs done. The good news is that:

• He hits his fly balls hard

• He has managed strikeouts in the Majors (26%)

• He seems to have a very good eye (76% of his swings at pitches in the zone last year, way above the league average)

He is penciled in to the left-field slot in Oakland right now, and he even hit lead-off for them in yesterday’s spring training game (check out Mike Kurland’s MLB Playing Time website for the spring training lineup information you could ever desire).

The projection systems have him playing about 3/4ths of the year and hitting around 15 homers. Over a full year that would be an 18-20 homer projection, and I think there’s ceiling for 25-30 if he can take a step forward.

Don’t draft him in standard leagues, but he’s a decent bench stash in very deep leagues, and he is someone to keep an eye on early on this year, he could be a valuable waiver wire addition if your team is short on homers.

I noticed this in the Red Sox preview several weeks ago, but here he shows up again. Now, his fly ball EVs were more middling than great (104.2 was just in the 59th percentile), but that really out-paced his barrel rate of just 5.4%.

I don’t think there’s a true correlation between bicep size and power production, but if there is, he certainly pops in that model.

The best part about drafting Duran is that you don’t need the power breakout for him to pay off for you. He’s a 25+ steal projection guy, and the Red Sox have already deemed him their lead-off hitter, at least to start the year. If he does up to an 8-10% Brl%, you’re looking at a potential fantasy stud this year, so I’m drafting him aggressively.

I’m not a Ty France drafter, but I can’t just pass him over here. Over the last three seasons:

2021: 650 PA, 18 HR
2022: 612 PA, 20 HR
2023: 665 PA, 12 HR

It seems loopy to think a guy like that can suddenly jump up to 25-30 homers. Real-life results predict future results better than more granular indicators like this, but look - he’s on the freaking list we’re working with!

A 104.8 90th percentile puts him in the 69th percentile which vastly out-paces the 6.8% Brl% from last year, and we aren’t talking about a ground-ball hitter here whatsoever (41.8% GB%). We might see another 20-bomb season from France, but I still wouldn’t draft him anything but a deep league (400 picks or so).

Varsho flopped hard in 2023, hitting just 20 homers in 580 PAs with a very poor .675 OPS. The Brl% fell to 7.3% from the 2022 heights of 10.2%. But that doesn’t seem to be explained by low EVs on fly balls, he was in the 69th percentile in terms of hitting fly balls well, so that would lead us to a higher barrel expectation. He also is one of the biggest fly-ball hitters in the league (36% GB%), so no worries there.

What might have happened is that he just hit his fly balls too high. His average launch angle was 18.9 degrees, seventh-highest in the league.

We really want to see the highest bars between 20 and 30 here, and Varsho had a ton of balls hit just below or above that.

I expect a better season from Varsho, and given his 20+ steals ability, he’s a pretty attractive roto bounce-back candidate, even without the catcher eligibility!

Man I hate writing about this guy, but I need to get over that. The truth is, Kelenic did improve that last year.

Saying that is a bit like when politicians brag about how they created jobs after everybody got fired in 2020, there’s really only one direction to possibly go in, but hey - better to move up to the first rung of the ladder than to stay on the ground.

21-22: .168/.251/.338, .569 OPS, 29.9% K%, 9.3% BB%, 26.5 PA/HR
2023: .253/.327/.419, .746 OPS, 31.7% K%, 9.9% BB%, 37.6 PA/HR

So the OPS went way up last year to about a league-average mark, but you can see it came at the expense of the home run rate, and it came without an improvement in the strikeout rate.

But credit where credit is due, Kelenic hit his fly balls very hard (84th percentile) and has managed the GB% (44%). There could very well be an improvement on his 6.1% Brl% here, in fact we should probably expect it. However, there are no signs of him getting the K% under control, so I still don’t think he’s a standard league outfielder even in the Braves lineup. That could change in a hurry though if he’s looking like a 26-28% K% with a 9-11% Brl%.

He’s been around for a long time, but he’s maybe a couple of years younger than you’d think at 32. He is coming off the lowest barrel rate of his career at 6.1%. That dropped 4.8 points from 2022, and was down 8.3 points from his career-best mark in 2021.

Those are huge declines in back-to-back years, which you don’t like to see, but I can’t really imagine Renfroe (career 10.7%) truly being a sub-8% barrel rate guy. For that reason alone, I would expect better things in 2024, and he should have a near everyday role in Kansas City.

The fly ball exit velo has come down from prior years, so there’s definitely some physical degradation here, but it’s still in the top half of the league at 103.9 and a season of full health and playing time could see that improve. He’s not a standard league outfielder for right now, but he’s a 25-30 homer threat to keep an eye on early on.

It’s low-hanging fruit, and he does have that big GB% problem that we filtered out, but it would be silly not to mention him here as a power breakout.

Elly’s 90th percentile EV on fly balls was 111.5, third best in the league (Judge, Ohtani), so yeah - any improvement on GB% should sent him to the moon in power output.

Just to give you some more names that aren’t super obvious. These are guys to at least keep an eye on this year, most of them have some obstacle to overcome first (getting off the bench, lowering K%, lowering GB%), but the swing speed is there to facilitate a power breakout if they figure some of that stuff out.

• Matt Wallner, Minnesota Twins

• Nolan Jones, Colorado Rockies

• Jesus Sanchez, Miami Marlins

• Luke Raley, Seattle Mariners

• Mark Vientos, New York Mets

• Jack Suwinski, Pittsburgh Pirates

• Brett Baty, New York Mets

• Riley Greene, Detroit Tigers

View the interactive plot here.

Check out the full data (table form) here.

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