Fantasy Baseball: 3 Things We Learned in Week 20

Baseball fans love their stats. We devour them, dissect them, and build our fantasy rosters around them. Each week of the 2021 baseball season, we will be gifted with another statistical sample size of pitches, plate appearances, and playing time. Knowing it often takes hundreds or even thousands of pitches or batted-ball events for trends to normalize, how should fantasy managers adjust to the ebbs and flows of weekly player performance?

Each week during this season, this piece will look at trends that have emerged over the past week and determine if it is signal or noise moving forward. What is prescriptive in helping build winning fantasy teams and what can be ignored as small sample size noise? Hopefully, we can make sense of what has just happened to help us make smarter roster and free agent budget decisions.

Let's take a look at some of the data from the 20th scoring period of the fantasy baseball season.

Buying the Lewis Brinson Hot Streak

What could possibly be better than Lewis Brinson's past week?

He hit .391 with eight runs, three home runs, and eight RBI, ranking as the eighth-best rotisserie hitter in that time frame. Well, for starters, the past TWO weeks have been better. Over the past 14 days, Brinson is at a .396 average with 4 round-trippers, 13 runs, and 17 RBI. We haven't seen a hot streak like that since Mikey D tore up poker games in New York so he could pay off Worm's debt.

In fact, Brinson sits near the top of the risers in expected weighted on base average (xwOBA) over his last 50 plate appearances, according to Baseball Savant.

What can we point to that has turned a career .204 hitter with a 29% strikeout rate into Tony Gwynn recently? For starters, the plate discipline has improved in the last couple weeks. On the season, Brinson has a 17% swinging strike rate and 15.4% called strike rate. In the past two weeks, those have both dropped to 14.9%. His contact in the zone has also dramatically improved -- he is at 87.7% during the hot streak while only 81.3% before.

But at the end of the day, it just comes down to Brinson hitting the ball harder with that improved contact rate. His Hard Hit% for the season sits at 44.6%, but it has spiked to 52.6% during August.

This is a player who just crossed the 40% roster threshold over the weekend, so it is worth checking to see if he is available in your league. If you need a power boost for the stretch run of the season, Brinson looks primed to deliver on what was once his massive potential.

What Do We Do With Tyler Gilbert?

Sometimes movie scripts just write themselves, don't they? How many Hollywood writers are in coffee shops right now banging out a draft screenplay of Tyler Gilbert's no-hitter from last week that they can submit to Disney+? For fantasy purposes, what we care about is can he continue to have a fraction of that success at the major league level, and should we invest our waiver wire priority or FAB dollars on the rookie?

After Sunday night's waiver run, Gilbert is still only 12% rostered in Yahoo leagues, showing that managers are being cautious and likely looking for more information before diving in. That is the smart move right now.

For starters, Gilbert next has a date with Coors Field. Not exactly a soft landing spot after your first major league start, but it's the hand he has been dealt. Gilbert never had a strikeout rate above 8.69 K/9 in AAA and is just 8.19 for his minor league career. As he progressed through the minors, his groundball rate -- once 47.5% in A ball -- dropped down to only 39% in AAA. On the other side of the spectrum, his flyball rate was just 29% in the low minors but crept up to 39% by the time he reached AAA. That type of contact won't serve him well in Coors this week.

But we need to have the long-term view with Gilbert. According to FanGraphs, their three projections systems peg Gilbert as just a very mediocre starter the rest of the way.

Our projections at numberFire are more optimistic and project he could be a top-40 starter the rest of the way. We look for him to have four wins, a 3.83 ERA, and a 1.28 WHIP the rest of the way. I would certainly bench him in Coors this week but then start rolling him out in the better matchups.

Add Bobby Dalbec

Bobby Dalbec (15% rostered in Yahoo leagues) - Dalbec comes with a lot of labels these days: post-hype player, platoon guy, Quad-A only, strikeout king; but he is another batter that just had the best 10-day stretch of his career and a very interesting trend emerged if you mine the Boston Red Sox lineups.

Before Friday the 13th, the last times Dalbec was in the starting lineup against a right-handed pitcher were on July 17th and July 23rd, both against Gerrit Cole. Not surprisingly -- since it's Gerrit Cole -- those games did not go well. No hits in six at-bats and three strikeouts. After the 23rd, he never was penciled into the starting lineup against a righty until last Friday. Why the sudden shift in philosophy? Simply put, Dalbec has started raking.

In the last seven days, Dalbec has been the 10th most valuable hitter in standard rotisseries leagues, batting .467 with 5 runs, 3 home runs, and 11 RBI. Those three home runs all came in games he started against right-handed pitchers as well. Granted, the starters were Jorge Lopez and Spenser Watkins of the Baltimore Orioles, but the stretch of strong offensive play allowed him to be in lineups and produce when he was barely given the chance the first half of the season.

The recent addition of Travis Shaw complicates things somewhat. As a left-handed batter, Shaw presumably was brought in to form some kind of first base platoon with Dalbec. Dalbec will always have strikeout issues as well -- he is in just the 1st percentile in whiff rate, according to Baseball Savant. But the power is there. He ranks in the 82nd percentile in average exit velocity and 96th percentile in max exit velocity.

If the past week was an audition for Dalbec to stay in the lineup for extended stretches, he passed it with flying colors.