BATTING: Revisiting 2011 overperformers

Back before the season started, the BBG looked at batters who seemed to have had “lucky” HR and BA performance in 2011 that made them gambles for 2012.

In every case but one, we advised caution in bidding or drafting these players to full 2011 value.

In this edition we’ll look back to see if that advice turned out to be sound, and comment on the whole idea of recency bias in player valuation.

Review: Methods

Our method was fairly simple: We found every 2011 batter whose fantasy value increased more than $15 over 2010 (batters with negative 2010 value were reset to zero dollars), and then found batters whose HRs and BA stats seemed to have benefited from unusual luck—uncharacteristically high HR per outfield flyball rate...

More From Batters