It’s time to take a look at the Fly Index leaderboard as we put May behind us. Brian Creagh updates the data most Sundays on his tableau page. This past week he added a great function: click on a player’s name to see their batted ball spray chart. It looks like this:

Here’s the top of the Fly Index leaderboard on 5/27/19 with a minimum 75 batted ball events.

  • Justin Smoak is heating up and the buy low window is closing. The lineup around him should get better as the young guys get acclimated.

  • Bask in the glory that is Gary Sánchez . He’s hit two more since these numbers were pulled.

  • Digging deeper on Kole Calhoun ’s stats you see a fairly high 38.6% FB-rate split vs LHP. He’s still putting the ball in the air from lefties, he just doesn’t get it over the wall at a great rate against them.

  • Can a team in a normal ballpark please trade for Brandon Belt ? We go through this every season when his quality contact comes into focus.

  • Big Dan Vogelbach has rounded back into his early form. He’ll always be a bit streaky but you have to ride him when he’s hot.

On the other end, we can look at the lower FI list and who’s HR% is an overachievement.

  • The other shoe has dropped on Tim Beckham . He’s always been up and down. It’s more down right now.

  • Jake Marisnick does this most seasons. He’ll hit a handful of dingers and then cool off. With all the young option the Astros have Marisnick probably isn’t a long-term solution.

  • Most projections had Victor Robles hitting around 10 homers. He’s almost there with 8 through 53 games. I’d expect his HR% to plateau as most rookies do as the season wears on.

  • You don’t have to look far to see why Justin Bour was DFA’d. Aside from the lack of production, he wasn’t making very good contact.

The Fly Index leaderboard is fully interactive. I encourage jumping in and playing around with the sliders and sorting to do some digging of your own. Fly Index fluctuates with hot hitting so be aware it isn’t the end all and be all of stats. It was more predictive of HR% than other metrics barrel% year over year, though. It’s worth examining FI as the first third of your fantasy season is in the books and you look to adjust for the rest of the year.