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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When I’m gathering up starting pitchers for a daily fantasy game, I often find myself staring at a mess of mediocre options in the middle of the pack. Sometimes I’ll see a bunch of okay starters facing good offenses, or poor starters facing poor offenses. When I look at the ERAs and the FIPs and the strikeout rates and find too many options that are too similar, I need some sort of push to pick one guy over another. At that point, I’ll consider looking at a pitcher’s ground ball rate.
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If there is a flaw in the pricing of hitters on daily fantasy sites, it’s that recent performance seems to be weighted too heavily. Just as an example, Jason Heyward was among the cheaper options for awhile after his slow start, but all the underlying numbers portended that he would rebound. And he has. He’s hitting .296 with four home runs over the last 30 days. If you rode Heyward until his price crept back up, you got some nice value for awhile.

If you can identify other guys with bad traditional numbers but good underlying numbers in the most recent sample, you can find some value plays to ride almost daily until the price catches back up. I like to start by looking back at K% over the last month or so. I’m looking for guys who are showing better plate discipline than they have in recent years but whose production and fantasy value is being depressed by some other factor. Below is a list of the hitters with the biggest improvements in K% over the last 30 days (min. 60 PA) compared to their K% since the beginning of 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

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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The first hurdle every hitter has to clear to make it into a daily contest lineup of mine is whether they are facing a pitcher of the opposite handedness (with a few exceptions for guys with reverse splits). With pitchers and platoon splits, I mainly look at how the team they will be facing performs against pitchers of the same handedness of the pitcher I am considering. But I’ve never given enough thought to left-right splits of individual pitchers.

I took a look at all qualified pitchers from the start of 2012 to see who had the biggest splits versus lefties and righties. Below is a list of the pitchers who had an xFIP of 4.00 or less versus hitters of the same handedness and an xFIP much higher versus hitters of the opposite handedness. Guys like Aaron Harang aren’t listed because even though Harang is much better vs. RHH than LHH, he still only has a 4.11 xFIP versus RHH. Read the rest of this entry »

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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We’ve talked about weather in this space a few times before, but (being my day job and all), I figured it could use some occasional expansion — you know — for those that really feel the absolute need to micromanage (be honest, that’s like half of the Rotographs demographic!). If you are like me and check your Draftstreet team (or daily fantasy lineups) somewhere between 6 and 7 PM ET, you probably want to do a quick check of the radar to look for any high impact rain events. I prefer to use the National Weather Service for a variety of personal reasons, but the vast majority of radars that weather sites use all use the same (WSR-88D) data, so it’s mainly a matter of taste (and ability to deal with blinking “click me!” ads). The below is just a quick example of the national radar mosaic I grabbed from the NWS around 9 AM ET this morning.

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There’s a truth in baseball these days: prospects, rookies, and other young players garner much of the hype and excitement in the media. Whether it’s because they represent near-infinite potential or simply because they’re the fun new toys for everyone’s favorite teams, young players are the best. It’s hard not to get excited about the new, hot thing — whether it’s a smartphone or it’s a 7-raw outfielder making his ML debut.

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Ugh. Four games. Options are obviously limited today. And once you start looking at prices and match ups, the pool of available players shrinks a little more. For example, Cliff Lee will cost you a ridiculous $20,543 today. Paying that price really makes it hard to fill out a lineup full of guys who will actually play today. And Lee’s match up isn’t even that great. The Padres have the 5th best wRC+ against left handed pitching and are only 17th in K% vs. LHP. In fact, there aren’t many good match ups to be found for starters today. Here is a chart showing each probable starter along with the wRC+ and K% for their opponent against pitchers of the same handedness. Read the rest of this entry »