Archive for Daily Fantasy Update

Most of the time when I’m picking a daily lineup, I make a custom leaderboard of the starting pitchers for the day to see which starters are most homer-prone. But this can be a tedious task to do day after day. So I’ve created the chart you see below which shows the most homer prone starting pitchers. I had a post a few months ago where I had charts showing hitters with reverse splits and the splits of switch hitters that I still reference often. Hopefully this post will be a similar bookmark worthy tool.

There are three columns. One for starters that are currently in a major league rotation with at least 1320 career batters faced (which is the point at which HR stabilizes) against batters of any handedness . The players listed have a HR rate against all batters that is two or more standard deviations above the mean. And then there is a chart for starters with 1320+ BF against lefties and against righties. The players listed in those charts have a HR rate against batters of that particular handedness that is one or more standard deviations above the mean. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few nuances in the DraftStreet scoring system that are worth remembering when setting a lineup – “best hitter” isn’t always the same as “best fantasy pick” for several reasons.

That is, you can’t just look at, say, OPS to gauge a player’s daily value. Instead, things like strikeouts (bad), stolen bases (good) and how they get their slugging points all have a major impact. If we compare the list of top OPS earners to the list of top DraftStreet earners, a few things stand out.
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Make hay while you still can.

It’s getting to be about that time where baseball gets really unpredictable, with rosters expanding and teams experimenting with young players and odd lineups. It means there might be more opportunity for bargains in daily leagues, but it also means there’s far more uncertainty.

Consider the graphs after the jump that show the amount of batters and starters used month by month over the past few years.
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On Monday I touched on the idea of examining how hitters have performed against specific types of pitchers to try and find good daily matchups. Because a batter’s performance against a specific pitcher is too small of a sample to be predictive, why not look at a batter’s performance against that pitcher and others like him?

Let me qualify everything I’m about to say by saying that this method of choosing batters is merely something I am exploring. Despite the increased sample size I can get by looking at a batter’s performance against similar pitchers, it’s still usually not a huge sample size. And I’m also doing a pretty crude job of finding similar pitchers. I’m considering strikeout and walk skills, groundball and flyball tendencies, frequency of fastball usage and velocity as my variables in finding similar pitchers.

It’s hardly scientific and nothing close to exact. But I’m almost positive it’s a better approach than just using simple batter-versus-pitcher data. But I’m not sure it’s better than just looking at how a batter has performed against either left or right handed pitching as a whole. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night at Miller Park, five home runs jumped off bats with the retractable roof open. Miller Park generally has a reputation as a hitter’s ballpark, but the five-homer output made me curious as to the difference in how the park plays with the roof open and closed and with different wind conditions.

So, let’s head to the ol’ Baseball Reference Play Index and pull all games from Miller Park since 2010.

The first thing of note is that it appears the Brewers don’t close the roof strictly for temperature reasons – there have been 11 instances of games being played with 90-degree temperature or warmer. We also know that temperatures have ranged from 60- to 71-degrees with the dome closed, so we would expect the park to play more hitter-friendly with the roof open versus closed.
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Anyone who reads this space regularly knows I love exploiting platoon splits in daily pools more than Kel loves orange soda. So today I’m taking a crack at trying to find guys among today’s probable pitchers with big platoon splits in 2013. This could help your roster management in a couple ways. Should you play that platoon-heavy (Matt Joyce?) guy against today’s pitcher? (the answer is no). You could also ask questions like “should you really run out that guy with a .400 wOBA against lefties against righty-mashers like the Red Sox?” (also no).

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This weekend I had the opportunity to attend Saber Seminar in Boston. It was a wonderful event full of presentations by some amazing people like members of the Red Sox front office staff, Harry Pavilidis and Dan Brooks, Keith Law, and Fangraphs’ own Dave Cameron and Bill Petti among others. I began writing this within 30 minutes of getting back from the airport last night.

For the purposes of daily fantasy strategy, the most interesting presentation of the weekend was that of SABR president, Vince Gennaro. Vince was lamenting the usage of batter-versus-pitcher (BVP) data by both managers and TV broadcasts. Likewise, I hate it when I see daily contest players rely on that data. Vince noted the small sample size issue with BVP data, but presumably he has also read the portion of The Book that proved BVP data is not predictive.

Vince wants to find a better way to play match ups. I assume he’s coming at it from the angle of finding a better way for managers to play match ups and to make both lineup and in game decisions. But his work is equally applicable to daily fantasy strategy. Vince looks at the following five categories in an attempt to determine the best match ups: Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for the slightly tardy post, but hopefully most of you can wait until noon or so for your Draftstreet lineups. Sundays are notorious for players (especially catchers) getting “day game after night game” breathers, so you’ll want to double check all your starting lineups just before game time. For fantasy leagues with daily lineup movements, I like to use my streaming spots for a couple util-type hitters on Sundays/Mondays (since I can sub out guys getting the day off on Sunday and those whose teams don’t play on Monday) and then use those slots for pitching streamers the rest of the week. Make sure you are hitting those “games played” maximums!

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I don’t have much in the way of a pre-amble today as it’s quite a busy day/week/month right now. Apologies for a non-research blurb here, then, but trust I put in the requisite time on The Daily Five.

I came fifth the other day in a DraftStreet daily pool. I’m still yet to take first in one but I’ve had so many near-misses now that I think I’m done with the “double-up” format. At first, those were my preference because the bar to returns was so low (roughly 40 points), but with so many spots paying out in “winner take all” formats, it’s hard to justify one fifth place finish versus five top-half finishes paying out the same (give or take). I can always just demand Eno pay me more if I run out of DraftStreet cash (note: this will lead to my termination).

You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.
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Why is Alex Wood only the 15th most expensive pitcher today? With a price tag of only $11,219, he represents a nice value today for several reasons, the first of which is that he is good. And we’ll discuss that more in a moment. But there is also the fact that he will be facing the Nationals who have the 4th worst wRC+ against left-handed pitching like Wood. And the weather conditions in Atlanta will be favorable for pitchers. Game time temperature is projected to be fairly low at 70, and the wind will be blowing in from right at 7 mph.

But Wood being good is the most important factor. Kevin Correia has a good match up and favorable weather conditions today, but that isn’t enough to make you ignore his below average ERA and strikeout rate. The quality of the pitcher is obviously still a factor. Read the rest of this entry »