Collette Calls: Ch-ch-changes

Welcome to the sixth week of fantasy baseball. I hope you've been able to get to a major- or minor-league game at some point this season. A major-league game has eluded my travel agenda to date, but that will be resolved no later than the middle of June, when I head to Baltimore for some games with friends and folks from the Joe Sheehan Slack community. I've already attended six minor-league games in North Carolina, the most recent of which was in the classic gem McCormick Field in Asheville, a stadium that is undergoing some renovations to meet MLB-imposed standards yet still holds a lot of his historic luster. The chance to get field-level seats with all-you-can-eat options for under $45 was too good to pass on, especially as it permitted me to get this shot of Yankee top prospect George Lombard Jr. using a torpedo bat in A-ball:

The torpedo bat is one of the more popular changes we've seen this season, but the noise appears to have quieted down for now. It was an easy change to spot because something immediately looked different to our eyes, and we could rush from correlation to causation and run with it. However, other changes that happen statistically are not always easy to spot because many of the ingredients which go into that recipe of change get lost in the overall numbers or just the volume of stuff thrown at us early in the season. Thankfully, BaseballSavant has a sweet Year-to-Year Changes Leaderboard which can help us see some of the changes happening before our very eyes that we may have overlooked. This leaderboard is one of the wormholes I could spend hours in looking for data points, but I will save you the trouble and will highlight certain things which caught my attention as I perused the board on Sunday night. This week's focus will be on hitters, while next week will focus on pitchers.

The leaderboard notes that a player "must have at least 2.1 plate appearances per team game played in consecutive seasons to qualilty. A pitcher must face at least 1.25 batters per team game to be qualified."

Hard Hit Rate

Rowdy Tellez: +24.6% increase

This would be a great example of something the box score stats are not fully showing. Tellez has a .170/.250/.434 line so far this season, but around a career-worst 30 percent strikeout rate has come four homers and two doubles with some quality contact while out hunting fastballs. Tellez is hitting .258 off fastballs with a .343 expected batting average but is 1-for-the-season against non-fastballs. I haven't watched him play yet this season, but this appears to be an approach built around crushing the first fastball he sees and hoping for the best. His average exit velocity is a career-best 95.6 mph and his expected batting average is 80 points higher than his current batting average. AL-only fantasy managers can hold on or pick up if he's availabile. Hopefully the sore hand from being hit by a pitch on Saturday doesn't linger, because Tellez's quality of contact is red hot even if the results haven't yet caught up.

Gavin Sheets: +20.1% increase

Sheets has the results that Tellez currently lacks, as he has driven in 12 runs with seven extra-base hits along with a .275/.314/.438 slash line. He has increased his average exit velocity nearly five miles a hour while also swiging with a career-high launch angle of 20.5 degrees. Like Tellez, Sheets is hunting fasetballs and squaring up many of the ones he's seen to date with his actual outcomes outpacing his expected ones. This new approach is coming at the cost of a career-worst 29.1 percent strikeout rate, and given how he's outperforming his contact, this is one you can fade while you take a chance on Tellez.

LaMonte Wade Jr.: -14.5% decrease

We knew that Wade Jr. had his limitations as a strong-side platoon partner, but this .110/.241/.219 start to the season over 88 plate appearances was unforseen by everyone. The walk rate and strikeout rate are very much in line with his previous efforts as well as his overall plate discipline, yet the quality of his contact has fallen off a cliff from the 70th percentile last season to the 12th percentile this season. Wade Jr. is still starting every game against righties in a first base platoon situation while hitting seventh on those evenings, but his hold on the role is only as strong as the options the Giants have on their roster. We should expect to see the club look to the trade market for a better solution to take advantage of their surprising hot start. 

Average Exit Velocity

Jonah Heim: +5.9 mph increase

Heim has four homers and eight RBI this year around a .246/.290/.462 start to the season. He too has a career-worst 27.5 percent strikeout rate to date, but has swung less often than last season. The issue has been his whiff rate is up nine full percentage points as he's looking to make the most of his quality of contact. The inclusion of Heim here is more for the fantasy managers who already have him, as he's not going to be available in many two-catcher leagues, but this start is interesting for his future as he looks to get back to his 2023 level of production. 

George Springer: +5.2 mph increase

Holy fountain of youth, Batman! Springer is hitting .325/.402/.512 with 10 extra-base hits despite his highest strikeout rate since the 2016 season. Springer looiked like he was accelerating into the aging curve last season but looks a lot like his old self at the plate thus far in 2025, as he, too, has been hunting fastballs. Springer has a .452 average against fastballs, as the league continues to challenge him despite the results, while Springer is 7-for-38 against non-fastballs with a lot of swing and miss. Those who gave the 35-year-old outfielder one more chance are being rewarded thus far, so enjoy the ride while Springer continues hunting fastballs in this manner. 

William Contreras: -4.7 mph decrease

We talked about his brother last week, but William is having his own issues. His .245/.348/.357 showing is not the type of production fantasy managers were expecting when they spent the draft capital required to roster him. He's in the midst of a seven-game hitting streak, but his last extra-base hit came on April 13 when he homered at Arizona. Contreras's bat speed is down from the 86th percentile in 2024 to the 67th percentile this season and his hard it hrate has plummeted from the 90th percentile to the bottom 30th percentile thus far. Unless Contreras is hiding a nagging injury, these early indicators are concerning. He did have a slump like this in the summer of last season but turned that around in August, so perhaps better days are ahead again for him. 

Bat Speed

Brendan Rodgers: +3.1 mph increase

This is another one for the mono-league managers, because Rodgers has a bench role in Houston and isn't producing any results from it with a low .224/.316/.286 line. However, he has wchanged something in his swing, because his previos bat speed sat just below league average hile now he's pushing well above league average when he plays. He really wants to test the Crawford Boxes as he also has the first double-digit launch angle of his career, but he does not yet have a home run to show for it. This is a 12-team AL-Only pick-up-and-follow situation, nothing more.

Anthony Volpe: +2.4 mph increase

We already knew about the torpedo bat usage by Volpe, but we also see him walking a lot more this season while increasing his bat speed from the 15th percentile to the 47th. Perhaps that change is what is driving the jump in strikeouts while pulling his average down, but he's pacing to a career-best RBI total so far and the weather is finally starting to turn in the northeast while also getting his launch angle back up to where it was in 2023, when he hit 21 homers. 

Josh Naylor: -2.5 mph decrease

This decrease is interesting given that Naylor is hitting a robust .318/.388/.505 this season while walking as often as he strikes out and settling in very nicely in Arizona. He is hitting at least .300 against all pitch types and hitting to all fields while doing so. It's worth noting his actual batting average against fastballs (.313) is 65 points higher than his expected (.248) due to the quality of the contact he is making. Still, Naylor is enjoying some batted ball luck, but it's very much in line with where he was in 2023 before the changes at Progressive Field turned him into a 31-homer hitter. Perhaps this is just Naylor returning to his roots instead of trying to repeat what nobody expected from him in 2024, especially with how he faltered down the stretch last season. 

Strikeout Rate

Shea Langeliers: 12.3% improvement

Langeliers has greatly reduced his strikeout rate this season, dropping it by 12 full percentage points from 27.2 percent last season to 15.2 percent this season. His reward: a batting average three points lower than it was last season. Langeliers is doing everything right. He has improved his chase rate to league average and has greatly reduced his swing-and-miss rate from the lower 25th percentile to the upper 20th percentile this season. His max exit velocity is elite, yet that .216 BABIP is doing him zero favors. He is hitting more groundballs this season, but he is fast for a catcher so that's not the same problem it would be for someone like Alejandro Kirk. If, for any reason, you are concerned about Langeliers and the repeat of another below-average batting average season, don't be. Better days will be ahead and we can almost bank on another 25-plus homers the way the ball is playing in Sacramento. 

Gleyber Torres: 12.0% improvement

Torres is about where we would expect him to be leaving the situation in New York. He's hitting .269/.333/.388, but for the first time in his career is walking more than he's striking out. Perhaps this is a side effect of no longer attempting to pop up homers to a short right field porch and being forced to play the gap-to-gap game at Comerica. Torres was never a chaser, but his swing-and-miss rate with the Yankees had declined in each of his final two seasons before rebounding nicely thus far this season. His current strikeout rate is his best since 2023 when he hit for his hightest batting average since the absurdity of the 2019 season. If you drafted Torres for the batting average, you are getting what you hoped for, and I don't see any reason why this is unsustainable if not even improveable. The challenge for Torres is getting back to double-digit homers, as he's not pacing well there and his run production is looking more like 2021 than anything else. 

Logan O'Hoppe: 10.3% decline

The good news? O'Hoppe is on pace for a 30-homer season and is hitting for his highest batting average in three seasons. The bad news? Only Christopher Morel has struck out more frequently than O'Hoppe has. Ironically, they both have a .256 average, because when they do manage to make contact, it's hard contact, and good things happen with hard contact. The funny part here is from a behavior angle, nothing has really changed for O'Hoppe. His chase rate is slightly better than last season while his swing and miss rate is only slightly worse. His swing length has gotten longer as he is selling out for more power, which is driving up what was already a high strikeout rate even higher. Something has to give here, as strikeout rates of this magnitude are not sustainable at any position. O'Hoppe is currently striking out once every 2.4 at-bats, and the StatHead search engine has zero examples of a hitter with at least 400 plate appearances striking out that often. The closest examples it surfaces are Miguel Sano in 2016 and 2017, Mike Zunino in 2018 and Russell Branyan in 2002. If O'Hoppe can pull off the .264/.352/.507 and .264 batting average Sano did in 2017, more power to him. Yet Sano at least drew walks. O'Hoppe is tracking more like that Zunino season where Zunino hit .201/.259/.410. 

All stats are through games played on April 27th