Park factors are not made equal across all days. Yes, Coors Field is Coors Field every damn day of the week, but different ballparks play differently depending on the temperature and wind.

That’s why it’s not always enough to simply rely on general park factors, useful as they may be, from our Guts pages. Park factors generally take about three years to stabilize, and so how parks perform in specific conditions is something we may never get reliable samples on, since we’re splitting that data even thinner.

ParkFactors.com can be a big help in this regard, crunching the numbers for us and giving us a quick indicator of how a park may play on the day. There’s also DailyBaseballData, which gives you all the raw material for you to make your own decisions (not to mention hour-by-hour forecast information).

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Jed Lowrie has had a solid start to July, hitting .296 over seven games and showing a few signs of rounding back into form. It’s been but a week, though, and there are still some troubling signs in Lowrie’s profile. Namely, Lowrie’s power seems to be missing, and that would mark the continuation of a multi-season trend of declining slugging ability.

To be clear, Lowrie has still been 20th in shortstop value, speaking to the importance of his run production and the general terribleness of the position. His positional flexibility helps some, too, but as a player who has never looked a threat to hit .275 consistently, Lowrie’s value hinges a good deal on his ability to clear the fence.

And again, that’s not happening, with just four home runs to date and a career-low isolated slugging of .109.
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One of the areas of baseball I’ve been able to find some success with beyond daily fantasy is betting on five-inning lines. Betting on a five-inning line works the same as betting on a full game, except, well, the game ends after five frames.

Basically, a bettor “knows” more about a five-inning game, because far less is left up to bullpens and managerial decisions. While there are obvious exceptions and other elements to consider, a five-inning line is largely a bet on starting pitching. Because we “know” more, the lines generally tend to vary less, but they can be instructive for the purposes of daily fantasy by narrowing in more closely to a starting pitcher’s set-up than a full-game line.

Those lines don’t replace a full-game line or a run-line in terms of value, but they’re worth a comparison.

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Damn, I wish DraftStreet held 5,000-person tournaments with big prize money every day. The 4th of July tourney was a lot of fun, and a No. 257 finish out of 4,811 was good for a 173 percent profit. Four people even broke 100 points on the night, which, yeah, I hope you all had Chris Sale if you were in standard tournament formats.

Here’s also hoping you’re not too hungover to get things together in time to play Saturday, with a 16-game slate and nicely staggered start times. Matter of fact, if you are hungover, I can think of few better cures than watching baseball all day.

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Do you like baseball? Cool, me too. I have not watched nearly enough baseball the past two weeks or so, which is disappointing. NBA Draft, free agency, moving…they’ve all conspired to keep me from watching the games. Luckily, we don’t need to watch.

I kid, of course. Watching the games is important, both because it’s fun and because the aggregate numbers can only tell you so much. For the purposes of daily fantasy, where we rely a great deal on projection systems, context clues from Vegas, and analyzing specific matchups, watching the game after you make a pick can be instructive.

But you can get by, for a short while, on the numbers and with reading. That’s what I’ve had to do of late and it hasn’t cost me, but I’m getting to the point where Sunday feels like it needs to be an outright marathon baseball-viewing day. The itch, it needs scratching.

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Just a week ago, we were looking at players I ranked differently from others or disagreed with commenters on for the month of June. Well, just like that it’s July, and it’s time for a new batch of shortstop rankings. These ones aren’t any more important than any other month, but they do provide an interesting look because they come right at the mid-way point of the baseball season.

Before we look ahead, however, I want to take a brief moment to look back. Can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been, and all that.
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There are a lot of different ways to evaluate bad offenses, which we’ve done a handful of times in this space of later. Simply grabbing a team’s wOBA against a certain handedness of pitcher is a quick and easy way. We’ve also looked at the average fantasy score of an opposing pitcher against that offense, as well as the distribution of those scores to get a better idea of the boom-or-bust nature of an offense.

Today, we’ll look at one other way to skin that cat, one that focuses entirely on the ultimate upside of a match-up.

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Baseball is a beautiful game. Tim Lincecum’s no-hitter is a perfect example of why. Down on his luck for the past three seasons, at least compared to his earlier success, Lincecum was able to be damn near perfect for one night, retiring all but one batter and striking out six.

Of course, for the purposes of daily fantasy, this type of unpredictable outburst is a black swan – you can’t plan for no-hitters, or anticipate them at all. You can, however, take two reminders from Lincecum’s performance.

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Back on June 3 when I posted shortstop tier rankings for June, I had no idea we would be gifted staff consensus rankings shortly thereafter.

As is always the case, there are varying levels of disagreement between the ranks (although when “tiering,”the rankings are far looser). Today, I wanted to quickly hit on a few names I seem to disagree with the group on, based not only on a difference in ranking but also, in one case, commenter feedback. As a reminder, this is with a rest-of-season focus only.

Troy Tulowitzki
Everyone else thinks he’s the number one shortstop. I happen to think he’s the king of baseball. Agree to disagree.
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Left-handed hitters are batting just .238 off of left-handed pitchers so far this season, posting a paltry .290 wOBA, roughly 20 percent below the league average for offense.

We know that the lefty-lefty match-up is a tricky one, and I think it’s generally accepted that the righty-righty match-up is less of an issue, because a righty who can’t hit righties would probably be filtered out of the talent pool before reached the majors.

Here’s how the numbers bear out so far this season:

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