Yesterday Blake Murphy recapped the impact of some of the bigger names that moved at the trade deadline. Today I want to touch on the potential impact that a few of the smaller names could have in new places.

Jose Iglesias moves to Detroit – Of the 90 qualified starters in the league, the Tigers have four starters that rank top 20 in BABIP. Anytime a team has four starters with a BABIP of .308 or higher, the defense is obviously a problem. And Detroit is no exception this year as they rank 27th in defensive efficiency. They turn only 69.6% of balls put in play into outs. For comparison’s sake, the Pirates lead the league in defensive efficiency with a rate of 73.3%. Detroit’s struggles aren’t entirely Jhonny Peralta’s fault, but he’s not helping. He has a UZR/150 that is slightly below average for his career (-0.7), but Iglesias’ career UZR/150 is 22.2. If Peralta is in fact suspended, Iglesias should help those Tiger starters lower their BABIPs. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know home runs are the best way to have a big fantasy day on the hitting side of things, but they’re really hard to predict. I have a little process I like to go through to try and identify the guys that are in the best situation to hit a home run, and it starts with park factors. Here on the site we have park factors broken down by handedness, which is a good place to start if you’re trying to pick home run hitters. Below is a chart showing which parks are most favorable to home runs for both left and right handed hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

In the preseason I wrote a piece in which I took a look at the pitchers who throw a particular pitch a lot but not particularly. I also looked at the hitters that are the very best against certain pitches. Because this is around the 20th daily fantasy piece I’ve written this year, I’m quite frankly running out of ideas. So I’m going to update the piece from the preseason.

The process is fairly simple. I started by taking all qualified starting pitchers since the beginning of 2011 (min. 300 IP) and pulling their pitch mix data for that time period. I then took each pitcher who threw a specific pitch at a rate more than one standard deviation above the mean and pulled their pitch values to see if that was a positive pitch for them. Below you’ll see all the pitchers from 2011 to present who threw a specific pitch at a rate much higher than normal and who had a negative pitch value. The idea is that you can choose hitters in daily contests that fair very well against that pitch type when facing these pitchers. I’m only looking at fastballs, sliders, curves and changes to prevent this from being too long. Read the rest of this entry »

I love the commenters on this site. I write elsewhere, and the audience is more interactive here than anywhere else I’ve seen. And it’s not just that they’re involved; it’s that their they’re smart. I’ve gotten several ideas for posts from commenters, and they frequently point out things that I miss. But I think they may have one thing wrong. Or at least there may be something upon which they’re placing too much weight.

When picking pitchers, the first thing I look at is the quality of the pitcher’s opponent against pitchers of the same handedness. Well, I take that back. The first thing I look at is whether the pitcher is any good or not. But I don’t usually have to look that up. After those initial hurdles are cleared, I look at conditions. I’m looking for cooler temperatures and winds blowing in (with a few exceptions). All of these factors generally go toward run prevention.

But commenters often point out a pitcher’s strikeout ability and/or the strikeout percentage of the opposing team. They note the importance of strikeouts on Draftstreet. I myself used to look at the opposing team’s K% as one of the more important factors, but I seemed to have more success when I placed most of my attention on run prevention. But was I right to favor run prevention over strikeout potential? Or are the commenters right? Is strikeout percentage the most important factor? Read the rest of this entry »

In the preseason, I took a look at the pitchers and catchers who are the best and worst match ups for base stealers. Today I want to update that piece. The home run is king in daily fantasy, but steals can help as well. Picking the best base stealers of the day won’t win you a lot of daily contests, but you can’t spend big on power hitters at every position. A steal will get you a couple of points on DraftStreet, plus it comes along with the point from the single or three quarters of a point from the walk that allowed the hitter to reach base.

Read the rest of this entry »

As Bryan Grosnick pointed out on Tuesday, the home run is king in daily contests. In Draftstreet scoring, a home run will get you a minimum of seven points (one point for each total base plus 1.5 each for the R and RBI). So I wanted to give y’all a list of the pitchers who allow the most home runs per plate appearance. The cut off for the reliability of HR/PA is 1320 batters faced (per @pizzacutter4) Here are the pitchers above that cut off that are on an active roster with the highest HR/PA (one or more standard deviations above the mean) against both left and right handed batters. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was on The Sleeper and the Bust with Mike Podhorzer a few weeks ago, he told me about his process for finding value in daily contests. The basic idea is that he breaks the rest-of-season ZIPS projections down to a fantasy points per game basis and then compares that to cost to find the biggest values. As I’ve learned, that process takes a bit of work, so I’m going to walk you through it.

The first step is to get the rest-of-season ZIPS projections into a spreadsheet. You can find daily updated projections from the ‘Projections’ tab at the top of the site. Then you need to eliminate the stats and columns that are not needed in order to calculate how many fantasy points a player is projected to score for the rest of the year. But don’t delete the games column; you’ll need it later to calculate projected points per game. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I wrote about hitters who might be undervalued because of poor recent performance that was being caused by something other than a decrease in skill. Today I’d like to take a quick look at the pitchers whose xFIPs were the farthest below their ERAs over the last thirty days. The idea again is that recent performance seems to be weighted too heavily in pricing, and these guys might have a little extra value in the immediate future. Read the rest of this entry »

If there is a flaw in the pricing of hitters on daily fantasy sites, it’s that recent performance seems to be weighted too heavily. Just as an example, Jason Heyward was among the cheaper options for awhile after his slow start, but all the underlying numbers portended that he would rebound. And he has. He’s hitting .296 with four home runs over the last 30 days. If you rode Heyward until his price crept back up, you got some nice value for awhile.

If you can identify other guys with bad traditional numbers but good underlying numbers in the most recent sample, you can find some value plays to ride almost daily until the price catches back up. I like to start by looking back at K% over the last month or so. I’m looking for guys who are showing better plate discipline than they have in recent years but whose production and fantasy value is being depressed by some other factor. Below is a list of the hitters with the biggest improvements in K% over the last 30 days (min. 60 PA) compared to their K% since the beginning of 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

The first hurdle every hitter has to clear to make it into a daily contest lineup of mine is whether they are facing a pitcher of the opposite handedness (with a few exceptions for guys with reverse splits). With pitchers and platoon splits, I mainly look at how the team they will be facing performs against pitchers of the same handedness of the pitcher I am considering. But I’ve never given enough thought to left-right splits of individual pitchers.

I took a look at all qualified pitchers from the start of 2012 to see who had the biggest splits versus lefties and righties. Below is a list of the pitchers who had an xFIP of 4.00 or less versus hitters of the same handedness and an xFIP much higher versus hitters of the opposite handedness. Guys like Aaron Harang aren’t listed because even though Harang is much better vs. RHH than LHH, he still only has a 4.11 xFIP versus RHH. Read the rest of this entry »