Hot Ice: Players who are hot and cold in fantasy baseball (4/8/21)

Welcome to Hot Ice, a column to help break down who in fantasy baseball has been hot and cold in the past week. The purpose of this article is to look at the “2’s”:

• Which players are hot and cold over the last TWO weeks (in this case it’s one week)
• Players who were historically hot over the last two years. (The fun part of this is while you may research which players were hot in April vs. June, what I did was take a culmination of each player’s game individually and then put a count on each one. So what you will see here is how each player fared between their 6th and 26th games over the last two years. I then RANKED these players against their peers, so what you will see are the highest-ranked players across those games over the last two years. Who might have struggled or been average through the first week of games, and then really got a fire going after that? Obviously there are a lot of variables when looking at this data—rookies, injuries, COVID-related absences, and being scratched—so I noted any player who ONLY HAD ONE YEAR’S worth of data due to one of those situations. Some names on this list are obvious, while others might surprise you.

I understand that isn’t an ‘end all be all,’ but I'm hoping you can use this data in context with other bits of information to make an informed decision with your lineup. For now it’s just batters, but if the appetite is there I will add in pitchers as well.

Last Two Weeks (well in this instance, it’s just one week)

Here are top five hitters across hits, runs, RBI, SBG, and homers. You can sort the table below to see the top players at each category.

Who’s Cold — Top 25 preseason hitters outside the top 250 with more than one game played

• Christian Yelich, OF: Batting .222 with 1 RBI through 5 games played.
• Trevor Story, SS: Through 5 games he has 1 RBI with a .227 BA.
• Jose Ramirez, 3B: Through 5 games he has no RBIs and just 1 run scored.
• Freddie Freeman, 1B: Through 4 games he’s batting .077. Freeman is historically strong going forward.
• Francisco Lindor, SS: Through 2 games, he is batting .125.
• Bryce Harper, OF: Through 5 games, he’s batting .200 with 1 RBI. He’s historically strong going forward.
• Cody Bellinger, 1B: Through 4 games, he is batting .211. He’s historically strong going forward.

Last Two Years

The below table ranks the top batters against their peers over the last two years in RBI, Runs, and HR, across games 6-26 played. (1 would be the best Rank).