(*) MASTER NOTES: Hot and cold in April
May 8 2015
April was National Stress Awareness Month in the U.S., and that might apply double to fantasy baseball players.
After all, after a month is in the books, we know how our players are doing, and we have to start making roster decisions.
Maybe not.
For all of 2013, Adrián Béltre had an OPS of .880.
But for April of the next season, 2014, Adrián Béltre had an OPS of just .686—a mark matched the previous season by the likes of Eric Sogard, Erick Aybar, and a bunch of other mid- to late-round players not named “Eric(k).”
Beltre’s cold start last April was a 194-point decline from the previous full season, down 22%.
League message boards and expert chatter sites were abuzz with analysis of Beltre’s slow start, and its potential as a harbinger for the rest of his 2014 campaign.
“Buy low!” said some. “He’s sure to rebound!”
“Sell low!” said others. “It’s the beginning of the end!”
But here’s the thing: A month is a very shaky foundation for analysis.
What’s a month, anyway?
A month matters in many aspects of our real lives, such as remembering which month includes your wife’s birthday—usually a few weeks after you’ve forgotten it. But for assessing baseball performance, it is just an arbitrary start-and-end point.
July, for example, is just a set of 31 days someone wanted to name after Julius Caesar. (They decided against giving him what we call “March” because that’s named after the war god Mars, and besides—Caesar had a terrible March in the 44 BCE season. Especially the ides.)
Curiously, nobody quite knows for sure after what, or whom, “April” is named. We do know about National Stress Month, and April is also National Poetry Month in the U.S. This is odd, since nothing rhymes with “April.”
Other cultures have completely different months, but you never hear a fantasy tout tell you to dump a player because he had a terrible Nisan.
But no matter what you call it, 30 days is 30 days. There’s nothing intrinsically different between the 30 days from April 1 to 30 and the 30 days from August 9 to September 8, except your thighs will chafe more in August.
You wouldn’t base a roster decision on a player’s performance from August 9 to September 8. Hell, you probably wouldn’t ever know how any of your players performed from August 9 to September 8. Nobody reports performance that way, and so we don’t think about it that way, either. So why would anyone base a decision on how he was playing April 1 to 30?
No patterns
Beltre’s recovery from a slow start, and especially his landing right back where he started, both support the BaseballHQ mantra of “exercise excruciating patience.” That mantra tells us we can afford to wait on established batters who happen to start the year slowly, and to avoid getting overly excited when a batter starts hot.
Most of the time, the mantra says, things will even out. As mantras go, this is actually a pretty good one for most things in life.
Certainly looking at 2014 seems to bear out the mantra’s position. Overall, hitters with OPS above .700 in 2013 and more than 300 PA in 2014 mostly exercised excruciating inertia, along with a tendency to feel the effects of gravity. So we can clearly see that Sir Isaac Newton would have been a hell of a fantasy baseball player.
There were 143 such batters in 2014, and 60% saw their OPS stay relatively stable, rising or falling less than 10% from 2013. Another 31% fell more than 10% from the previous season. And only 9% saw their OPS rise more than 10%:
2014 PA >=300, 2013 OPS>.700 ============================ Between 86 60% OPS DOWN <=-5% 45 31% OPS UP >=5% 12 9% ---------------------------- ALL 143
And there is no indication that an anomalous April signifies anything for the balance of the year. Among batters whose April 2014 OPS was down 10% or more, 77% saw their OPS from May-September revert right back to within 10% of their 2013 level.
Among batters whose April was up 10% or more from the previous year:
- Only 8% also saw more than a 10% increase in their May-September OPS;
- 16% saw an OPS decrease of more than 10%;
- And 78% stayed—again—pretty much where they were.
Nor was there any pattern within the season that reflected first-month performance. Most batters bounced around in a relatively narrow range near their previous year OPS, some built up slowly, some declined slowly.
Some bounced around like a two-year-old on Red Bull. Yasiel Puig’s monthly OPS marks were .925 in April, 1.223 in May, .657 in June, 1.113 in July, .543 in August, and .808 in September, all adding up to an .862, a modest 7% below 2013. Nelson Cruz had an OPS of 1.136 in May and a .988 in September, but was under .600 two of the other three months.
Logan Morrison had a catastrophic .377 in April—I remember this well, as he was on one of my teams at the time—and a .483 in July, but also an .806 in June and a 1.043 in September, after I waived him.
And Adrián Béltre went on to have:
- An .862 OPS in May;
- A 1.013 OPS in June;
- An .879 OPS in July;
- An .851 OPS in August; and
- An .891 OPS in September and October.
When 2014 was over, Adrián Béltre had an OPS of … .880, exactly the same as the year before.
There are literally scores of other examples.
The point is that April is not all that significant, beyond the aforementioned National Stress Month, the occasional religious celebration, and possibly my wife’s birthday.
As mentioned above, April is also National Poetry Month, so we close this edition of Master Notes with the most delightful of poetic forms, the limerick:
A 30-buck slugger one year
Caused owners in April to fear
“Is he starting to fade?"
“Should I seek out a trade?”
Just relax! For the rebound is near.
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