Beyond the traditional stats that everyone knows about, more and more daily fantasy sports players have begun employing advanced rate (K%, BB%, SIERA, FIP) and weighted stats (wOBA, wRC+) in order to get a leg up on the competition. Now that these stats are no longer the secret that they used to be, what else can you use that other players aren’t to win back that competitive advantage? If you’re looking for something that doesn’t always show up in the results, but may give you a better idea of how a player is really performing, why not look at Batted Ball Rates?

BBR are LD (line drives), GB (ground balls), FB (fly balls). Classification can sometimes be skewed between LD’s and FB’s depending on who’s recording the data and some trackers have even resorted to classifying Fliners, which is basically the best thing if you’re a hitter, but most still stick with the main 3. There are also sub-groupings of FB’s into HR/FB (home runs per fly ball) and IFFB (infield flies per fly ball). You can generally visit a site like Fangraphs and filter BBR for any period you wish from current season, to current week, to career.

Although LD’s will rarely leave the yard, it should be obvious why everyone wants to hit them. If not, it’s because more line drives mean a batter is really squaring up the ball and they, by far, lead to the highest rate of success (.700+ AVG) among the batted ball types. A lot of times they’ll be singles, but they can also find gaps for extra base hits. If you knew a batter was going to hit a line drive every time up, you’d probably take him every night with those odds of success, even if you knew how unlikely it was that he’d homer.

Most LD rates usually trend somewhere between 15-20%. Anything above 23% is extraordinary. In fact, only 2 active hitters (min. 3000 PA) have a career LD% above 24%. They are Todd Helton (25.2%) and Michael Young (24.2%). Makes sense, right? Many players have been able to sustain a higher LD% over a full season, but very rarely over 30%. This year’s current leader is Joey Votto at 33.3% (another shocker).

“Great, genius. Joey Votto’s good.” you’re probably saying, “Now how does this help me?”

Well, baseball is a game of streaks and luck. A hitter who hits a lot of line drives isn’t always going to see 70% of them of them drop for hits. Beginning this season, I started tracking line drive rates for the trailing 7 day period on all batters. As I said earlier, fangraphs.com allows you to pull and filter all BBR for just about any period you want. I guess someone with a lot of time on their hands or some programming knowledge can run xBABIP (expected Batting Average of Balls in Play) calculations on every player each morning based on BBR to gain even more of an edge, but luckily, that’s not most daily fantasy players.

Through the 1st half of May, one guy’s name kept coming up as a player who hit a ton of line drives, yet was only batting around .240 with little power and below average production overall. Because the results didn’t meet the performance, he was very affordable and in my lineup almost every day. After a few days, I saw the LD rate was still very high, but I became impatient when the results had not improved and stopped using him. Several days later, he started to take off. This player had just a 60 wRC+ through April, but improved to 110 in May, and now has a 160 wRC+ in June and a 106 wRC+ on the year. If I had stuck it out a little longer (with the right matchups of course), I would have been ahead of the curve and gotten some nice production from him at a great price.

Here is a list of the top 10 LD%’s in the majors through June 17th. See if you can guess which guy I’m talking about.

Some of these players (Votto, Konerko, Kinsler), you’re not going to get a discount on. Some of them (De Aza, Kubel) are more expensive now, but I was able to jump on solid batted ball rates earlier and get some value at decent prices. Some (Helton, Alonso) haven’t lived up to expectations yet this year, but might provide some under the radar value going forward. Lastly, if you haven’t guessed yet, the player I was referring to earlier is Jhonny Peralta.

If you filter for the past 7 days right now (6/11 – 6/17), you find 3 qualified players with LD %’s above 40, but wRC+ below 100. They are Chris Getz (46.7 LD% , 94 wRC+), Jeff Francoeur (41.2, 90), and Gordon Beckham (41.2, 35). Will they provide some value beyond their price going forward? We’ll see. Filter for yourself every day and see if you can pick out some hidden gems the rest of the daily fantasy baseball world isn’t aware of yet.

One more note on LD% and PA’s: you want to be careful with guys who walk and strike out a lot as they’ll have a lot of PA’s, but not necessarily a lot of batted balls in their sample size, but the 3 players listed in the previous paragraph have all put bat to ball at least 18 times in the last week.

In part 2, we’ll jump into the other 2 types of batted balls (FB’s w/ subsets and GB’s) and talk about where their value lies for different types of players.