Week 16, So Hitting Volume Really Doesn't Matter, huh?

 

Kevin and Sarahbeth celebrated Rowan's 4th birthday party recently at the aquarium, Kevin then later toasted his rise back up the power ranks

• The top tier of this chart just can't seem to get its act together. Arthur, Dave, and Kevin have been jostling for first in the power ranks for over a month now. Good luck guessing any given week which team will be the best team among them, let alone project that to the playoffs in ~2 months
• Michael took a big jump, more on that later
• Keith continues to thrive in his Spoiler Era

• Kevin put the team back in gear this week and came away with the highest EWW this week. 22 HRs is an enormous number that carried the rest of his counting categories and SLG. huge huge offensive week.
• Michael popped here again and has now been the best team over the last 4 weeks again. after having to struggle through his third wave of top 200 player injuries, Michael found a beat this week mostly carried by his pitching. It feels like only a matter of time before more injuries beset him.
• Keith, according to Week EWW minus YTD Avg EWW had the most out-performing team this week...again. Keith is no longer last place in the Yahoo Standings, as that claim belongs to....
• Robert, oh Robert. A crippling -15.5 Wins Over Expected this year is cruel. EWW says he's the 6th best team, the Power Ranks say he's the 7th best team, but his season appears to be over. Pour one out and hope that your fantasy season never has that fate.
• Max faceplanted this week and is on the doorstep of being knocked out of the playoff chase, he has just been unable to find it this year
• Conversely, Paul is living his blessed life with a +17 WOE. He's been waiting for the bottom to fall out on his season, and it just keeps not falling out. He heads into a pivotal 10 day matchup against his main (not currently top-4) competitor, Michael, for the playoff spot. If he puts up a big week, which he's done plenty of times this year, he will be in a sustainable place for the final playoff push and even a possible BUYER at the trade deadline.

We have to talk about this Arthur/Dean Matchup longform. Dean had over 100 plate appearances more than Arthur. At the surface level, this should have been a death knell for Arthur...but it wasn't. This blog has written before that an at bat (or plate appearance) edge on your competitor is not as valuable as an innings pitched edge on your competitor, but this Arthur run of terrible hitting volume has gotten out of hand...I had to dig in to understand. Arthur has an incredible hitting base of talent, also well-covered by the blog this year. But when a number of players establishing that base got injured, common sense would say that one needs to at least drop enough injured players to fill out a starting roster...but that's not what Arthur did. But Dean is the king of volume right now and just had one of the highest plate appearance weeks of the year, so surely Arthur would be put in his place for his decisions....well...no. Arthur won 7 of 8 hitting categories and only lost RBIs by 2. Arthur's offensive efficiency was ridiculous with 12 HRs in 220 ABs, that's relatively close to Kevin's 22 HR pace this week over 345 ABs. Arthur would surely say, "yeah but if I had 120 more ABs, they would have dragged down my ratios and had more hitting Ks." And today, who is going to argue with him? 

Naturally, I dug into the league-wide data to try to make sense of this. Using Weekly Hitting Expected Weeks Wins, I can run a correlation between how many Plate Appearances a team had vs how good their whole-team output was, it's as close of a "what is more important: volume or talent," that we can get? This year, the correlation between a team's Plate Appearance count and their Hitting EWW is 0.26, this is a pretty low correlation. The pitching categories tell a slightly different story, the correlation between innings pitched and weekly Pitching EWW is 0.34, still not as high as I was expecting. 

What does this tell us? Well, volume isn't everything, it's really not much at all to be honest. It's not a negative correlation and its not 0, so increasing volume helps, it just wont cover you when you have a bad week against a team with a good week, and that's what happened when Dean ran into Arthur this week. 

OK but is this sustainable? What if Michael had just taken all his injuries and sat on his hands? He'd have had a starting roster of Brent Rooker, Mookie Betts, Ronald Acuna, Brandon Nimmo, Corey Seager, and Vinnie Pasquantino who have all been underperforming or terrible when not injured. He'd have not found midseason breakouts like Josh Jung, Spencer Horwitz, Dillon Dingler, and Kyle Karros. Max was injured nearly identically to Arthur, but he was not as proactive until very recently to fill the void, and his team was not able to keep up anywhere near as well as Arthur's did. No, I would not call the Arthur model sustainable, but he pulled it off. Kudos to him, and we'll see if it keeps working the rest of the way.