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The daily salary cap format has become much more prevalent in the past few years. I would imagine a large part of that has to do with the fact that daily fantasy sites have figured out a good way to monetize fantasy sports. But those sites couldn’t make money if we didn’t like playing the format.

If you’re thinking of trying the format out, or if you play and are looking for thoughts on strategy, allow me to describe the strategy I employ.

Let me start by noting that I’m not a huge fan of risk, so I generally play low-risk, low-reward games like double ups, which pay out roughly the top half of the entrants each day. You get the same payout as a head-to-head matchup, but you don’t have to take on the risk of having just one opponent. As a result, my strategy might not be best suited for those who like to play the “lottery ticket” type games where you risk a small amount of money to win a big pot against a lot of other players. You need upside and luck to win those pools.

My strategy begins with the idea that you should save on pitchers when possible. There are quite a few guys I’m higher on than most, so I target them because they’re usually underpriced in my opinion. If I can’t find two bargain pitchers, I’ll just pick a stud with a good matchup to go along with a bargain. Depending on how much money I can save on pitching, I prefer to grab as many high priced hitters as possible. Hitting is just so variable day-to-day, so I’m willing to pay for the guys who go oh-fer less often.

When choosing hitters, the number one thing I look at is platoon splits. I want to pick guys who are really good against pitchers of a certain handedness and who happen to be facing such a pitcher on that day. Other factors like the park and the skill of the opposing pitcher come in to play, but platoon splits are the biggest consideration.

When you can’t find bargain pitching and don’t have much money to spend on hitters, splits can help you find undervalued players. And when you have a lot of money to spend on hitting, it’s important that you be careful not to pick good hitters who struggle against pitchers of a certain handedness.

To help me pick players each day, I created a spreadsheet with a tab listing all players who had 100 or more plate appearances against lefties last year and a tab with all players who had 240 or more plate appearances against righties. I used a different number of plate appearances because there are more plate appearances to be had against righties. I wanted to look at players who got a fair number of plate appearances against pitchers of a certain handedness.

I listed each player’s wRC+ alongside their name. I chose wRC+ because it easily allows you to see how far above average that player is against pitchers of a certain handedness. The league average wRC+ is 100, so if a guy has a wRC+ of 140 against LHP, that means he’s 40% better than average against lefties.

Below are four lists. The purpose of each list is:

• Identifying potentially underpriced options against LHP
• Identifying good hitters to avoid when they are facing LHP
• Identifying potentially underpriced options against RHP
• Identifying good hitters to avoid when they are facing RHP

For the potentially underpriced options, I listed guys with who aren’t owned in all leagues (with one exception) on the assumption that guys with lower ownership percentages will usually have lower prices on daily sites. I also tried to list at least a guy or two from each position. For good guys to avoid, I listed big name guys with high ownership percentages. Enjoy!

For the first time this year, I am participating in a league that counts on base percentage instead of batting average. And it’s a big league — Tout Wars. Eno and I are both competing, so we will have first hand knowledge/experience with this format and how hitter values change. As a result, we will be able to include OBP analysis in our articles if enough of you readers play in such leagues.

So, please tell us whether you play in a league that includes OBP as a category instead of AVG.

This probably should have been posted before the season, but the idea just came to me. We see research here all the time, and that research often produces fantasy baseball sleepers, so let’s gather them in one place.

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I don’t know about you, but I’m thrilled that Opening Day has come (for most franchises). I assume that if you’re reading Fan/Not/RotoGraphs, you’re probably pretty stoked as well. And nothing says “irrational exuberance” like making changes to the way you look at fantasy players based on a single game on Opening Day.

Nevertheless, there are some things worth talking about — for fantasy — that came out of the past two days worth of baseball. While nothing should dramatically change the way you look at players, a few things happened that seemed to confirm previous theories, or show indications of potential events in the future. So let’s talk about some of the funnest stuff from yesterday and how maybe it’ll be a sign of things to come in fantasy this season.

Chase Utley: Still Great At Baseball

In fantasy, Chase Utley was usually drafted about tenth among second basemen, according to Mock Draft Central. Utley usually popped in the middle rounds (between 8-12), and behind players like Jose Altuve and Aaron Hill and Brandon Phillips. This is not because Utley is a bad, or even average hitter, but because of lingering concerns about joint health in his balky knees.

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Another year has begun and, as always, ottoneu players are actively working the free agent pool, searching for that missing piece that can put them over the top. Or maybe we are all just busy trying to find replacements for those guys we really didn’t want but got stuck with at the auction.

With the auction-wire red hot right now, I thought I’d take a look at the six players who are in the most active auctions at the moment.

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Mainly I have spent my time over the last couple of days getting the list of players officially on DL updated. I have divided out the players officially on the DL and others who may not play because of injuries. These list will become clearer over the next few days as teams must decided if the player is healed enough to play.

To start the season, 104 players were placed on the disabled list. Last season almost 500 trips were made to the DL, so a fifth of the DL trips have happened before the season starts.

Recent injury data

 • Johan Santana is done for 2013 with a re-torn shoulder. No fantasy value here.

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Gotta pick him up. Chris Coghlan won a rookie of the year, y’all. And he’s got a job. Sort of — a platoon with Justin Ruggiano — but he’s got a job in center field in Florida and he’s a former ROY winner and he hit .321 once.

If you take Coghlan’s rookie of the year season and extrapolate it out to 700 plate appearances, he had a .321/11/10 season. And that was when he was pre-peak. He’s now 27 and likely to be the fastest and strongest he’ll ever be.

And now his career is on the line. Justin Ruggiano strikes out too much to be an impediment. Expect Coghlan to take this job and run with it, hitting .300 with 15 home runs and 15 steals. That would make him one of the better values of the season, considering he’s owned in zero percent of leagues. Zero percent, guys, what’s going on here. He was the rookie of the year!

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If you’re looking for a starter to stream or if you’re trying to find some value in some sort of salary cap daily format, here are three guys I like to begin with and like even more given their matchups in the opening week.

A.J. Griffin, Oakland Athletics – 4/4 home to Seattle

Griffin was solid in an 82.1 inning debut last season. He posted a 3.06 ERA and 1.13 WHIP with a strikeout rate around league average (19.1%) and above average control (5.7%). He might have a bit of upside in the strikeout rate as his swinging strike rate was above average. But because Griffin doesn’t have a huge fastball, I’d expect any improvement to be fairly small. But a league average strikeout rate can go along with an above average pitcher when the pitcher has some other skills as Griffin does. Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t drafted your fantasy team yet, then sit back and enjoy the fact that there simply isn’t enough time for you to be the moron at whom I am directing this post. If you have, then I implore you…DON’T BE THAT GUY!

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The Yasiel Puig movement is starting in Los Angeles. Carlos Beltran is hurt in St. Louis and the temptation is to turn to Oscar Taveras. And Wil Myers was the biggest prospect traded this offseason, and he’s on a team that could use a corner outfielder. What to do with these young outfielders in redraft leagues?

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