Kicking Off the Grind

If you play daily fantasy baseball or tinker with your traditional fantasy team, knowing park factors is a part of success over the long haul. FanGraphs Guts! has all kind of factors, but I prefer to focus my attention on the Basic, HR, and HR by split factors. Winning in a daily fantasy league tends to depend on home runs more than other types of production (at least on the offense side).

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As the season wraps up, there isn’t much to do but look back. With that in mind, I pulled all of the pitcher data and converted it into total DraftStreet points for the year.

Ideally, we’d have average price or purchase history to compare it to, but we don’t. The best we can do is look at the leaders and if anyone sticks out to you as a surprise, we can discuss in the comments.

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As the season wraps up, there isn’t much to do but look back. With that in mind, I pulled all of the player data and converted it into total DraftStreet points for the year.

Ideally, we’d have average price or purchase history to compare it to, but we don’t. The best we can do is look at the leaders and if anyone sticks out to you as a surprise, we can discuss in the comments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Blake Murphy detailed how some teams are using a lot more players in their lineups late in the season so that we can identify good pitching matchups. More youngsters in the lineups means better stats for pitchers. But young hurlers don’t see as much late season experience because of innings limit concerns. This explains why a large majority of the probable starters today are guys who have been in the majors for most of the season. In my estimation, all but three or four of today’s probables have been around for most of the year.

Today’s probables also happen to be a pretty above average bunch. Below is a chart showing how today’s starters have fared this year compared to league average.

Because there are so many good starters going today, you’re probably going to need to load up on more expensive hitters facing the few bad starters today. To save some money for bats, we’ll pick some of the cheaper starters with at least decent matchups. After the jump there will be a chart showing which of today’s starters you should be stacking up hitters against and how those starters fare against hitters of each handedness, and then we’ll pick some names.

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Alright folks, it’s the final four days of daily fantasy! At this point, the primary concern you should have is whether or not guys are in the lineup. Teams give young players opportunity, shut injured players down, and generally troll fantasy players with their lineup cards.

To get an idea of which teams have been most guilty of that, the table below shows the number of players each team has used in September. It also shows the number of qualified hitters (3.1 plate appearances per team game) as a second gauge to measure how often bench players are playing. The last column shows the team’s September wOBA which, despite being a small sample, can help along with the other columns in picking a team to pitch against.

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Last week of the season? It’s time to chase those final categories. With only five full days left in 2013, your team pretty much is what it is. It’s time to begin a targeted attack for those last few roto points. And by a “targeted attack,” I may mean “mass waiver wire purge.” We have 3% of the season left. It may emotionally hurt to kick top-40 players to the curb (especially if your team name is a pun on one of their names that you think is pretty freakin’ clever), but 5 not-so-shiny pennies in a bag of 162 doesn’t dull the other 157.

In less bad-currency-analogy terms, I offer some examples. I’m leading in ERA and WHIP (by a considerable margin) but am trying to run down our first-place guy in strikeouts. Suddenly, whether or not a pitcher has a good matchup or great peripherals doesn’t matter to me; whether or not he can punch out more than a couple guys does. Jordan Zimmermann? Adios. David Hale? Yeah, I can give you a shot. In that same league, I’m in a seven-person cluster, all within 8 home runs. While I’m not winning stolen bases, I’m eight up and 15 behind. Not a lot of room for movement there. Goodbye, Jacoby Ellsbury (actually, he’s been gone for a while now), Eric Young, and Billy Hamilton. Hello, Josh Rutledge, Mitch Moreland, and Darin Ruf. Could you guys just run into a couple over the next few days? That’d be great.

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It’s almost over now. With just a week or so left of regular-season baseball, the time is now to use your late-season knowledge to win as much as you can in daily fantasy. Can you take advantage of too many fantasy mavens focusing on Peyton Manning and LeSean McCoy* instead of Yu Darvish and Jose Bautista?

* – For Canadians, feel free to replace Manning and McCoy with Phil Kessel and Erik Karlsson.

As always in fantasy, knowledge is power — but even more so as we hoof it to the finish line. The best thing to do is stay up to speed on which players are now going to be out for the rest of the season. Let’s go over a few missing persons and their potential replacements as the season comes to a close.

Are the playoffs here yet? Because I’m a) tired of watching the Rangers lose, b) sweating out the day-to-day fluctuations in my big money roto league, and c) trying to find something new to say in this article twice a week. So after the jump I’m going to repeat a couple of things. First, I’ll have a chart showing how each of today’s probable starters have performed against batters of each handedness this year. And then I’ll pick a few players and recite some familiar analysis alongside them.

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I’ve got nothing for preamble again. Dog days, and all. But I’m at your mercy – give me a topic to research and it’ll be in here tomorrow!

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I’m going back to the well and once again providing a chart showing how today’s probable starters have performed against hitters of each handedness this season. After the jump we’ll use the chart to pick a few hitters and a starter or two.

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