As fantasy players, all we are really trying to do is to predict the future. No big deal, right?

The question we want answered is this: which player will score more Runs, hit more Home Runs and RBIs, get more Stolen Bases, and hit for a higher Average tomorrow? or next week? or next year? depending on the design of your league.

So what we really need to know is ‘Which stats are the most forward-looking?’ What stats point (as well as can be expected) to better future performance?

I did some research that went something like this.

In case you are unfamiliar, R-Squared tells you how related each stat is, where 1.00 is perfectly related, and 0.00 is totally unrelated. Also, I used five years of performance data, not just 2011-12.

The goal is to replace the ‘?’ with a single statistic, or a set of stats. I hit up Fangraphs.com‘s stat library, matched up one year’s production to the next’s, and ran the numbers. Here are the most predictive stats, with some commentary.

Runs. It makes sense that these stats are somewhat self-predictive, but why are Runs more predictive than RBI? I think because a player cannot fake Runs. He cannot come up to the plate and score four times. A player can come up to the plate and knock in four RBI. Additionally, scoring Runs requires several skillsets. Hitting Home Runs requires a big bat, Stolen Bases requires speed. Players who score a lot of Runs can probably do more than one of those things well. Runs is far and away the best predictive stat.

Average. One of the biggest problems with Runs is that to be at the top of the MLB leaderboards, you have to play all season. Rate stats do not require that. If next year’s must-own is not getting playing time now, he will not score many Runs. But he might hit for a good Average. St. Louis’ Matt Adams can hit. He should be on your radar for 2014. In 2013, he is a member of the Cardinals’ bench, and not playing much. He has scored 5 Runs so far this season, and he is hitting for a .400 Average in 40 AB. His Runs total says he probably is not going to get playing time in the immediate future, but his Average says if he did, he may score a helpful amount of Runs.

wFA/C (pfx). You may not know what this one is. Pitch F/X is a video system installed in each Major League stadium that tracks the type, velocity, movement and location of every pitch thrown. wFA/C answers the question, ‘For every 100 Fastballs a player hit, how much WAR did he generate?’ or ‘How well did this player his Fastballs?’ which is a necessary skill for any player to have if he wants to stick around.

Pinch Hits. This stat is negatively correlated to future performance, meaning, the more Pinch hits a guy has, the worse you can expect his future performance to be. I had to think about this one a bit, but I concluded that this is all about playing time. Every time a player Pinch Hits, it means he was healthy and on the 25-Man Roster, but did not start the game. If a player sits, that hurts his fantasy production.

These are the four most predictive stats for position players. I was careful to not select any redundant stats. For instance, Total Bases are extremely predictive of future fantasy performance, but are too closely correlated to Runs to be useful. It would almost be like counting Runs twice. With these four stats, there is as little overlap as possible.

Here is a Top Ten Leaderboard of 2013′s Predictive stats. Maybe see if Daniel Nava is available in your league and try him out for a week or two.

I had been setting one of my fantasy rosters on a theory this season. That theory went something like this: if a team has a brutal travel schedule during a week, I should bench those players, since the excessive travel may wear them out.

For instance, the White Sox were in Chicago on Sunday, opened a three-game series in Minnesota on Monday, and then are off to Los Angeles to start a four-game series on Thursday. That is a lot of travel with zero off-days.

While the theory makes sense, I had to check the numbers on it. I looked at 2012 travel schedules by time zone. For example: how do Eastern Time Zone teams do when travelling to Central Time or Pacific Time, and how does that compare to road games within the Eastern Time Zone. I did the same for Central Time Zone teams and Pacific Time Zone teams. The Rockies are the only team in the Mountain Time Zone (during Daylight Savings), and with the added Coors Field effect, I left them out of this.

Here is the breakdown:

Eastern Time Zone (14 teams)

Central Time Zone (7 teams)

Pacific Time Zone (8 teams)

You may remember that the A’s and Mariners opened the season in Tokyo last year. You can see that the cross-hemispheric travel was probably tough on the offenses.

To summarize, travelling to the Pacific Time Zone is tough. This week when the Nationals visit Chavez Ravine and San Diego, they will be playing games until 1am Eastern Time, their local time. But to their opponents, the game will only run until 10pm, who did not have to travel for the game.

It does not work in reverse, though, because when the Dodgers travel to Atlanta this week, the games will only run until 7pm Pacific Time.

I suspect this would have a bigger effect on older players. I never had any trouble staying up until 1 or 2am when I was in my early twenties. Now that I am older, that is not the case.

The takeaway is to avoid (older) players who are visiting the West Coast, or to expect a bit of an offensive drop. Be sure to look at it the other way for pitchers.

We know that getting Infield Hits (IFH) is a skill that peaks early in a career (around age 23-24) and goes away. This is due to the speed required to beat out a ground ball.

For your education, here is how I calculate Infield Average (IFA):

[ Infield Hits + Bunt Hits ] / [ At-bats - Strikeouts ]

How often has a player collected an infield hit on contact?

But how impactful is the IFA skill to fantasy baseball 5×5 stats? I have done some legwork to answer that question. Here is a table in which all counting stats have been converted to a 150-game-pace.

You can see the speed aspect show through in the Stolen Bases.

Other than that, this skill takes away (in HR & RBI) more than it adds (in R & AVG). Players who are Elite IFHers are putting the ball on the ground often, and essentially stealing first base.

When I first started looking into this, I assumed that an elite IFHer would be able to inflate his AVG, but (as a group) they are not able to add more than a few points.

One important result of investigating IFA is that it forced me to also look at Outfield Average, or OFA. How often does a player get an Outfield Hit (OFH) on contact?

[ Hits - (Infield Hits + Bunt Hits) ] / [ At-bats - Strikeouts ]

The fantasy 5×5 impact of this stat is dramatic.

Far more important than barely inflating AVG with IFH is driving the ball to the outfield. When a player can do that well, they are a championship caliber fantasy player.

The result of this study, I would say, is to understand that we often combine two events (IFH & OFH) when looking at AVG. They are two separate events caused by two different skills, speed and hitting. And hitting is much more impactful and important.

This is a continuation of the conversation on Infield Hits, and the effect they have on offensive performance.

My first assumption is that a player’s ability to collect IFH is heavily tied to how fast he can run. And speed is a skill players lose with age.

I worked up an aging curve for IFH.

The blue line is a trendline meant to smooth out the actual data.

You can see that getting IFH is a skill that only decreases with time. In fact, this particular data set says that after the Age 23 season, the best a player can hope to be is below average.

The IFH Avg+ (set to a mean of 1.00) looks like this:

• Through Age 23, 1.10
• After Age 23, 0.88

This is a skill that goes away, and does so early in a career.

Even so, this age-related decline has a very small impact on Batting Average. The below-23s added about .011 points of AVG because of this phenomenon.

That said, elite IFHers can add around .050 AVG points over players who do not possess this skill.

A very common sabermetric line of thinking is ‘Ground balls are good for pitchers.’

If that is true, then ground balls are bad for hitters. Following my recent posts on non-zero hitters, I began thinking about near-zero events, and have begun investigating ground balls for hitters.

Ground balls can be productive. They can move baserunners up, produce RBI, even generate hits. That last part calls for some investigation.

If a player got enough infield hits, his batted ground balls (which should not bring much production) may add a significant amount of production to his yearly totals.

If you buy this line of thinking, and I will have to do some more research to determine if I do, then Outfield Hits are driven, productive hits, and Infield Hits are rolling, relatively unproductive hits.

Since the start of 2012, the MLB leader in IFH is Nori Aoki, with 52. Over that time period, he has hit .285 and slugged .426. Without those 52 hits he averaged .199 and slugged .340. Now, .199 / .340 is not reflective of any skill level Aoki possesses, but I do wonder if collecting infield hits is a repeatable or regressive skill. More to come on that later.

For now, here is a list of hitters who have heavily relied on IFH for the production, listed with their Outfield Average and Slugging. Again, I still need to figure if this is significant; just consider it descriptive.

• Nori Aoki – .199 / .340
• Ben Revere – .206 / .251
• Erick Aybar – .213 / .336
• Emilio Bonifacio – .160 / .235
• Jean Segura – .213 / .300

On the flip side, there is a player who has just one IFH in the last year-plus.

• Alex Avila – .218 / .380

You can see that Avila’s OF AVG/SLG is better than everyone’s above. In fact, both numbers are league average. Avila has hit just .231 / .335 / .366 since the start of 2012. He has done that with a league-average ability to drive the ball, and a pathetic inability to sneak out more than a single infield hit.

What does that mean? I will let you know.