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Daily Fantasy Baseball: Which Hitting Stats Have the Highest Correlation to Fantasy Points?

Baseball presents plenty of stats to investigate, but only some have high correlations to daily fantasy baseball scoring. Which stats should we focus on most?

Bryce Harper got down with his bad self during the 2015 season.

Over the span of 654 plate appearances, Harper clubbed 42 home runs while slashing .330/.460/.649 with a .461 weighted on-base average (wOBA). They were numbers that hadn't been seen in nearly a decade, and they were done by a dude in his age-22 season.

Not too shabby.

However, Harper did not win the batting title that season. That honor went to Dee Gordon, who had a .333 batting average with 38 fewer home runs than Harper. That's the guy who won the award that is supposed to go to the league's best hitter.

If you're reading a site called "numberFire," you're probably more aware of which stats actually matter than an antiquated MLB award. I don't need to tell you that batting average is a useless stat because there is plenty of empirical and anecdotal evidence to show that Gordon is not more valuable than Harper.

What about in the fantasy realm, though?

Here, we can quantify a player's value simply by looking at their points scored. It boils things down into one, easy-to-digest number that tells us Player X performed better in this realm than Player Y over the given span. It's not hard to figure that out.

However, we don't necessarily know which metrics will best guide us toward the players who will excel here. If we want a great real-world baseball player, we want one with a high wOBA. What should we be looking for when it comes to fantasy?

Today, we're going to take a look at that, using FanDuel's scoring rules. Which traditional statistics have the highest tie to fantasy output? Let's dig in.

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