The weather looks good for a full day of baseball today! Worst precipitation chances (outside of the domed Marlins Park) appear to be in Philly, Baltimore, and Atlanta, but coverage will be isolated at best. Low odds for a total washout.

Assuming it doesn’t rain in Baltimore, it appears they win the best hitter environment award, with high temperatures sitting in the upper-80’s (30-33 degrees for you Celsius kids out there) and a forecast wind out to left field somewhere between 10-15 mph. I like my right-handed hitting Blue Jays and Orioles today, especially guys who may be borderline in standard leagues (ex: teams that have J.J. Hardy as a backup shortstop, perhaps?).

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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 »

The Astros, Mets and Pirates all have Thursday off. That’s three of the four most strikeout-prone offenses in baseball unavailable to pick on with a streamer or a starter in daily fantasy leagues. The Braves remain, but Mat Latos is going to come at a hefty price. So should we throw up our hands and give up on trying to find strikeouts Thursday?

Well thanks to some hard work from Steve Staude, we have a better idea of how strikeouts develop based on pitcher and hitter profiles. I encourage you to download his tool and play around with it, as I have for today’s match-ups.

Based on some complicated methodology, we can plug in league, player and pitcher strikeout rates and get an expected strikeout rate. As an example, the Twins strikeout at a roughly average 20.2% rate (20.7% against lefties), while Matt Moore strikes out 22.8% of hitters he faces. You may think he’d then be expected to strikeout roughly 21.5% of Twins batters, splitting the difference, and you’d be right – Steve’s formula spits out 21.9% as the expected strikeout rate (using the Logistic method – the other methods are more bullish on Moore).
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Rain, rain, go away.

While no MLB games have been postponed the last couple of days, unsettled weather has been threatening. Tonight is no different, and the spatial extent of the wet weather along the east coast should be greater than it was the last couple of days.

Both Pittsburgh and Cleveland appear to be under the gun for scattered strong to severe storms this evening. Nothing implies a total washout, however, guys interested in starting pitchers on the Pirates, Indians, A’s, or Jays might want to check the radar closer to 7 PM to see whether a rain delay or two might be in their future. Few things smart as much as having a starter go three scoreless innings with five punchouts only to get yanked because the tarp had to stay on the field for more than an hour.

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What’s the biggest thing we look for when putting together our daily fantasy offenses? Home runs. Homers are the fastest way to rack up points, and they absolutely can lead to big days.

Though in a scoring system like Draftstreet, players get the same number of points any way that they get to their total number of total bases, when a player hits a home run, that’s four points you lock up in just one plate appearance. Conversely, it takes a 4-for-4 night with a player only hitting singles, to get to that same total. (Runs and RBI apply separately.)

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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 »

Hello Daily Fantasy friends. Not much of a pre-amble for today as I’m writing this late on Saturday night. Sorry about that, but take the recs below and I’ll try to provide some match-up notes beyond the five daily five.

*San Diego at Washington has a high temperature and a major wind blowing out.

*Ditto for Atlanta at Philly and it goes double for any lefties, as the wind is strong out to right.

*Righties in the Pittsburgh at Chicago match-up have a favourable wind out to left.

*110 degrees in Arizona? Even with a wind blowing in, that kind of temperature will play up at Chase Field.

*Monster winds blowing to left for Baltimore at New York with 90-degree temperature to boot.

*Even more monster-ish (is that a word? Probably not) in Kansas City, with a 95-degree temperature and an 18 MPH (!) wind to left.

*Somehow, with heat all over the map, Los Angeles at San Francisco finds itself as a 65-degree game, playing down offenses.

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Ahh, Rangers Ballpark. You wonderful, offense-inflating yet confusing masterpiece.

The home of the Texas Rangers has been the subject of some discussion in response to some of my recommendations of late. At times, admittedly unsure of the “best” wind conditions for the park, I have touted players because of a jet stream effect and/or because of a wind blowing out to right field.

It’s been suggested that the jet stream effect is most impactful when the wind blows in from center, causing a stream out to right. To me, this is the same as a wind to right, but I’m nothing close to a meteorologist. Since I couldn’t find an article (in an admittedly quick search) explaining the conditions there, I grabbed some data via the BRef Play Index to try and make heads or tails of the park.
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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 »

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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