Agenda
Agenda
Agenda
Perhaps you recognize the Factor Grid. It’s an important part of my column – The Daily Grind – which will return in a little over a week. The grid is a quick look at the most important park factors for a given day – home runs by handedness, weather, and notes on extenuating circumstances (i.e. rain or snow). There are any number of fantasy websites with overcomplicated analysis of daily park factors and matchups – usually behind a paywall. I prefer a simple spreadsheet.
The Factor Grid can be easily used to select hitters in the best offensive venues and pitchers in defense friendly environments. This has obvious use to DFS participants, but it’s also helpful to traditional fantasy owners who like to stream or have a deep bench.
Let’s move onto the grid (or use the link):
The data comes from FanGraphs Guts! I have doubled the park factors so that they’re stadium specific. This introduces some small rounding errors (+/- 1). Guts! has the park factors halved by default so they can be used to transform full season player data. We don’t care about full season applications which is why I’ve doubled them.
I’ve color coded each stadium for a neutral weather day. Green means good for hitters while red is good for pitchers. Eleven stadiums are generally offense friendly, six are mostly neutral, and 10 are pitcher friendly. Progressive Field and Fenway Park have unusual factors which allow them to play are both friendly and unfriendly to hitters based on handedness. Wrigley Field has strong wind effects.
Weather can affect the color coding. As we all know, Wrigley park is very pitcher friendly early in the season due to cold weather and inward winds. Once summer rolls around, the winds blow out and the balls fly. The park will usually be listed as green or red rather than yellow. Particularly unpleasant weather could bump any neutral park down to a pitcher friendly rating. A very fine day could bump a neutral park into the green.
We can use park factors in the offseason too – specifically for players who are changing venues. Last year, I used Josh Donaldson’s move from the Coliseum to the Rogers Centre as an example. We know how that went. This year, Neil Walker is moving from a park with a 76 factor for home runs to a stadium with a 104 factor. Aaron Hicks is swapping Target Field’s 88 home run factor for Yankee Stadium’s 122 factor. Other hitters who could benefit include Justin Upton, Jason Heyward, Mark Trumbo, Brett Lawrie, Austin Jackson, and Jimmy Rollins.
This year, two parks have new dimensions which means that the old park factors can’t be fully trusted. We should see a few more home runs in Miami while the Rockies are trying to cut down on big flies.
That covers the basics. Now, onto questions.
I had a conversation on Twitter the other day in relation to the latest DraftKings “scandal.” Don’t worry, this one is actually pretty bland. DraftKings pays some people to write about DFS and make recommendations. These same people also play and make money on DraftKings.
It’s the same thing a thousand writers do (including me on RotoGraphs). The affiliated writers don’t receive any inside information. The only difference between what I do and what they do is that DraftKings profits directly from their content. Also, one of their writers has made millions of dollars. I’ve made a few thousand. I suppose that’s a noticeable difference too.
I had hoped to be done with this topic for the offseason. The mistakes of the two main daily fantasy (DFS) operators – FanDuel and DraftKings – have become increasingly apparent. After slowly ramping up advertising in 2013 and 2014, we’ve been hit with a flood of TV and radio spots pushing daily fantasy as a get rich quick scheme.
Now we’ve entered a new chapter of the daily fantasy drama. Last week, New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman declared daily fantasy to be gambling. He asked FanDuel and DraftKings to cease and desist all operations in New York. They’re now the seventh state to ban the games. And once again, DFS has drawn negative press in comedy news – this time from John Oliver.
Over the last couple weeks, I’ve examined the current DFS debacle and some reader perspectives. And I keep getting hammered with a fundamental misunderstanding of the “sport.” Sure, any given day of DFS is wildly unpredictable. The same is true of baseball. Does that mean there’s an incongruity between DFS and the need for large sample sizes we espouse here on FanGraphs? No.
Last week, I wrote about the various debacles facing the DFS industry. Like any short-sighted capitalists, FanDuel and DraftKings have been grabbing as much revenue as possible. Unfortunately, it looks increasingly apparent that both industry giants forgot about the nature of their service. In America, DFS is only quasi-legal. Draw too much of the wrong attention and they could be punted from one of their largest markets.
Last Saturday, I was watching Daily Show re-runs from the previous week. When I saw FanDuel and DraftKings had wrangled a lead story, I was happy. Obviously the segment was going to be about the “insider trading” scandal. DraftKings employees have made around $5 million on FanDuel. It’s bullturds, but it’s also hard to get too bent out of shape about it.
It’s accountability week for yours truly. Yesterday, I wrote/gloated about my winning roster in the ottoneu league FanGraphs Staff Two. I consider that post my reward for winning an otherwise free league. Today’s conversation is decidedly less celebratory. My DFS season didn’t come close to replicating my 40 percent ROI from 2014.