Happy America Day from Canada!

For those of you who plan on spending your Independence Day doing the most American thing possible (drinking beer and watching baseball), DraftStreet has provided early start time pools as well as late start time pools. So you can root your picks along while you watch all day.

And this wouldn’t be a July 4 fantasy baseball column without a bad segue about fireworks – if you’re not planning on going anywhere to watch them, tune in to San Diego at Boston, where Fenway is sure to provide just that.
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I really wanted to recommend Max Scherzer right off the top today, but I can’t bring myself to do it. He costs $20,513 in DraftStreet budget, nearly 21% of your total budget, and I just can’t tell you, the reader, to invest a fifth of your purse on one player. Even if the Jays are possibly without Edwin Encarnacion and Adam Lind, and even if they did play Munenori Kawasaki at designated hitter yesterday. Can’t do it.

You can get away with a $15k pitcher if you’re frugal elsewhere. But when you get up to the $20k level, you’re basically forced to start, say, a P.J. Walters in the other SP slot just so you can employ actual batters in your line up.

And at 20% of your budget, a guy like Scherzer (or Matt Harvey, who comes in at $250 less against the Diamondbacks) would have to get at minimum eight fantasy points to just return 20% of your expected points (and that’s in a double-up format where your goal is 40 points, not maximizing necessarily).
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I’m taking over the shortstop beat around these parts. You’re welcome…like Staind said, it’s been a while since…there have been tiered rankings done for the position. So you’ve no doubt been running around the waiver wire aimlessly, not knowing your Seguras from your Espinosas.

That ends now, where we try to make heads or tails of the position that, according to Baseball Monster, has only provided four net-positive value players so far this year, two of whom are now injured.

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This has nothing to do with baseball, but go out of your way and find the image from the Tour de France yesterday with the van stuck under the finish line. Honestly looked like something out of Arrested Development. Watch out for hop-ons…you’re gonna get some hop-ons.

Fortunately for us, none of us ever get stuck at the finish line, because we’ll have room to spare at the fantasy finish*. (*This does not apply to me, I’ve had a bad week in daily leagues. But you should still take my advice.) It’s a good day for baseball, with a lot of beautiful weather set-ups and some fun match-ups for viewing purposes.

But you’re here for daily fantasy, DraftStreet or otherwise, and you probably want something valuable for a pre-amble other than me going stream-of-consciousness.
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DraftStreet has blessed us with a 4 p.m. EST start for the bulk of daily leagues today, which is great considering that only one game starts at 1 p.m. and only a handful start at 7 p.m. or later. We’ve got nearly a full slate of games to pick from, which means…disagreement, of course.

The more options available to us, the more strategies one could employ to try and achieve success. You’re always trying to maximize points, but those in a double-up pay-out format may be aiming for 40 points while those in a winner-take-all are looking for the big upside plays.

We’ve been over this kind of stuff before, but it warrants repeating that you will eventually find your own risk profile and your own preference for ceiling versus floor.
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I feel strongly that the work of Bill Petti and Jeff Zimmerman on Edge% is one day going to give us a more complete idea of how pitcher’s attain success.

Right now, we know that elite Edge% pitchers, those who hit the edges of the strike zone (especially horizontally) with the highest frequency, are, at the very least, some of the best at limiting walks. We know that the better the Edge%, the better ERA and FIP tend to be, even though BABIP tends to be higher.

Perhaps most importantly for daily fantasy, what Edge% doesn’t tell us is who strikes out the most batters – the top 10% in Edge% do better than the next couple of groups, but it’s the pitchers between the 25th and 50th percentile, for whatever reason, have the highest strike out rate (and the highest walk rate, less surprisingly).
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I’ve gotta do things a bit different today. I’m gone for the weekend so I’m writing this on Friday morning, which means two things: I am dealing with way less certainty surrounding weather and line-ups, and I’m getting prices off of a file I believe to be correct from DraftStreet but really don’t know.

I realize that most daily leaguers don’t have the option to set a daily roster in advance (for the record, I don’t either, and am just making recommendations and not playing this weekend), but the following tips will hold for those times you can manage to set a line-up late the night before or early the day of, without the benefit of waiting for less volatile weather or line-up guess work.

And that word is key in times like this – volatility.

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When the Toronto Blue Jays, by way of Mike Aviles, picked up Esmil Rogers for John Farrell this offseason, I thought…well, not much. I don’t care for Farrell, and as far as returns go, Aviles for Farrell and then Aviles and Yan Gomes for Rogers seemed fine.

When I dove into his stats from 2012, I saw a guy who improved pretty dramatically when he got out of Colorado. I also saw a guy with a pretty strong profile for relief success – a fair number of strikeouts, a walk rate that wouldn’t kill you, and an above-average groundball rate.

So I thought the Jays had picked up a decent 7th inning guy.

I did not think they had picked up a solid 5th starter in this deal, mostly because Rogers only had 22 major league starts to his name, accompanied by an ERA over six in 100 innings or so. He also wasn’t a guy who had ever been successful at the Triple-A level as a starter.
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I’m going away for the weekend. Normally I cover the Saturday and Sunday daily fantasy posts, but this weekend I’ll only be handling Saturday’s edition, and I’ll be writing it Friday morning. The blurb that day will be about taking safer players with assured playing time when you set a daily roster that far out.

All of that is to say, I might have a tough time being in the money on the weekend, so there’s added pressure to go HAM on today’s daily fantasy and really cash in. Let’s swing for the fences, folks. It’s just too bad we don’t have Jeff Francis to pick on today.
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There’s more than one way to skin a cat is a saying that exists. Why the heck that’s a saying, or how it came to be one, is beyond me, but it’s worth keeping in mind when it comes to daily fantasy leagues.

Case in point: when I first started playing DraftStreet, I wanted the glory and the big gains. Entering the “standard” format pools where only the top few performances are paid out, I was getting a little frustrated that finishing, say, 10th out of 100 people wasn’t upping my bankroll. After all, being consistently near the top is probably more impressive than occasionally being the top performer.

So I lowered my cash out expectations and switched primarily to the “double-up” pay-out format, whereby the top 50% of players get paid out double their entry fee. The gains are much smaller, but in the long run it’s probably a better strategy for me since I’m confident I can continue to beat half the field.
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