Top 100 Hitters for 2020

Here are our Top-100 hitters for fantasy baseball in the shortened 2020 season that starts up July 23. These hitter rankings are built off the same Philthy Projection system I used to look at the hitting prospects in our fantasy top-100 list.

The final rankings start by placing the projections into a 15-team traditional 5x5 roto league using batting average, runs, runs batted in, stolen bases, and home runs as the scoring categories. Then final sort was done with input from myself and our fantasy team chief, Eddy Almaguer (top overall player in TGFBI’s Historical Standings).

To see each hitter’s 2020 projection, simply click the down arrow next to his name. A pop-up will appear with a full projected batting line.

Here’s a brief overview of the method:

  1. Collect the raw player stats from the last three years. For hitters with minor league and/or NCAA stats in the last three years, those stats are translated using a minor league equivalency process.

  2. The raw stats get neutralized by handedness to remove the effects of the player’s home park.

  3. A weighted three-year average of the neutralized stats are created using Tango’s Marcel 5/4/3 method.

  4. The weighted three year stats are regressed toward league average. For hits on balls in play, a player’s three year batted ball profile (Soft/Medium/Hard hit balls and LD/GB/FB%) is used in the regression. For home runs, Statcast barrel rate is used in the regression.

  5. The regressed stats are placed in to the player’s projected home park for 2020.

  6. The regressed and park-adjusted stats are then age adjusted.

The Philthy Projections will favor hitters who have a history of hitting the ball hard, hitting a large percentage of line drives, and hitting a lot of barrels over the last three seasons. You’ll see that as a result, these projections will create higher and lower BABIPs than the standard publicly available projections.

These projections will also handle rookies differently than the publicly available projection systems by weighing multiple years of MLE data. Also players like Keston Hiura and Evan White will have their 2017 NCAA performances included in their 2020 MLB projections (cool!)

A table with my full raw hitting projections for approximately 450 hitters will be released tomorrow.