Baseball's Power Outage & What It Means to You

In case you didn't notice, home run numbers took a steep decline in 2010, continuing a trend that has been happening for years now.  Comparing 2010 to 2006, there were a total of 773 fewer homeruns hit throughout the league.  Since the landscape of fantasy baseball has changed so much in five years, should we now put a higher premium on the power hitters for fantasy baseball?  Eh, not so fast.

Number of players hitting certain HR marks by year

While there's no doubt that the quantity of homeruns across the league went down, it doesn't necessarily have a direct effect on value of HR's in fantasy leagues.  The standard deviation (how spread out the numbers are) tells us a lot more about the value of the home run in rotisserie leagues.  Depending on how far apart everyone is from the mean on average, the value for those at the top can be different.

Looking at the average number of homers hit by the top hitters (those with 10 or more HR), there is not much difference at all between 2007 to 2010 with all them being between 19-20 HR on average for that group.  The main difference lies within the standard deviation for those years.  2010 had the smallest amount of standard deviation out of the past five years (and by a large margin) which means that more and more hitters were bunched closer to the league average and there were less outliers on either end of the spectrum.

The chart above shows distribution of how many players are reaching various homerun marks each year.  The closer the curve is to the bottom, the more valuable a person is within that range because of how rare that mark is.  In 2006, if you look at the 35 or 40 HR mark, there were a lot more people who did it so it wasn't quite as valuable (23 players hit 35 HR in 2006 while 6 players did it in 2010).

So, yes, in 2010, it was a lot more valuable to own someone who hit 35 HR for your team.  If we left it at that then you'd make a conclusion that power hitters are thus more valuable.  But, the whole structure of the league basically changed and 40 HR became the new 50 HR while 30 HR became the new 40 HR.

Getting a 50+ HR hitter like Jose Bautista is phenomenal for your fantasy team in this current market but it's not feasible to expect that out of anyone these days.  And, while some places might recommend putting a higher premium on homeruns because of the scarcity of them, the market actually hasn't changed much at all.  All that has changed is that you should look at 40 HR as a huge achievement and adjust your expectations as a result.  But, power hitters are still relatively the same value as they've always been even if they hit less HR than they used to.  So there's nothing to see here.  Move along and don't believe any hype out there that might suggest to change your strategy because of less home runs being hit.

Posted in: 2011, strategy