Let’s time warp to 9 months ago:
Isaac Paredes just hit 20 HR last season, and being 3B eligible meant he was a sexy late round pick in some fantasy formats, however there were some red flags; Paredes batted .205 and not only did he not hit the ball hard consistently, he rarely barreled the ball:
Just to set the tone on the importance of barrels relative to HR, there were 5,868 out-of-park HRs hit last season, of those 5,030 were barrels, that’s 86% of every HR hit being a barrel. Just to show how strongly correlated the two are, here’s a chart of every batter season in the statcast era (min. 10 PA) showing the number of home runs hit (on the y-axis) with barrels hit (on the x-axis):
Let’s look at where Paredes was among just 2022 hitters (20 HR, 17 barrels):
Based on this chart, clearly Paredes was an over-performance compared to his peers, as some on the internet would say he is “a fraud”. However, while Paredes didn’t barrel the ball, what Paredes did do was hit pulled fly balls:
Let’s do some more math, 86% of HRs were barrels, but that doesn’t mean every barrel is a HR, in fact it’s only half true. There were 10,035 barrels hit and 5,030 of them were HRs. That’s 50% of barrels hit being HRs.
Meanwhile there were 8,767 pulled fly balls hit, of those 3,421 were HRs. That’s 39% of pulled fly balls being HRs. Obviously 50% > 39%, but consistently hitting pulled fly balls is a meaningful indicator for certain hitters’ ability to hit HRs.
Let’s go back to the end of 2022, Isaac Paredes hit 20 HR with a 26th percentile barrel rate, but he had a 99th percentile pulled fly ball rate (4th out of 333 players w/ 150 BBE). So the goal is to see if there are undervalued power hitters who did not hit a ton of homers, seem like frauds based on barrel rates but Pulled Fly Ball Rates show they actually might take a step forward next season.
Putting this altogether, let’s look at some players with single digit barrel rate, double digit pulled fly ball rate in 2023 who look interesting in 2024:
This isn’t to say all these players are breakout candidates (especially not Nick Maton), but it definitely makes a player like Jake Fraley more interesting, especially because he plays in a ballpark where fly balls already play up. Also not sure why Mike Yastrzemski is considered a non-factor in many rankings.
