Daily Fantasy Strategy — April 14 — For Draftstreet

The platoon advantage is a huge part of picking hitters for daily lineups. But just because a hitter doesn’t have the platoon advantage does not always mean you shouldn’t pick that hitter on that day. Some guys are good enough against same-handed pitching. Some guys have reverse splits. And then how do you handle switch hitters who always have the platoon advantage? Which side are they better from?

Below are a couple of charts. The first shows the guys who either have reverse splits or don’t have much of a platoon split. From what I can tell, Draftstreet does factor in whether a player has the platoon advantage when calculating his price for the day. As a result, the guys in the first chart could be values on days they face same-handed pitching. And the second chart shows how switch hitters fare from both sides of the plate. It might be handy to bookmark this post if you need to look up a switch hitter’s splits as opposed to looking up their player page each time you’re thinking about using them.

I should note that I only included players who have at least 450 PA from both sides of the plate since the beginning of 2011.

The Daily Five

Below is a chart showing projections and the cost per projected point for the starters in today’s Draftstreet games. All I do is take the Steamer RoS projections, cut them down to a per-game basis, run them through the Draftstreet scoring system and then adjust for opponent. Josh Collmenter and Roenis Elias have no projection because Steamer did not have them starting any games this season.

Jordan Zimmermann is a must start today. He has the highest projected point total of the day going up against the Marlins, and he’s roughly the same cost as four or five other starters behind the most expensive starter of the day, Matt Garza (who should be avoided). If you need to go cheap, Eric Stults and Hector Santiago are worth the risk at their prices.

Rays Stack

I love the Rays for daily fantasy purposes because of their use of platooning. Stacking three or four hitters from the same team is a strategy I use, and it works best when you can stack guys who hit consecutively in the lineup. Tampa usually makes it easy to find four consecutive guys with the platoon advantage. I’m guessing Desmond Jennings, Wil Myers, Ben Zobrist and Evan Longoria we’ll be atop the order. The bottom half of their order should also probably provide a very cheap stack option, but you shouldn’t need to go cheap today given the most expensive pitcher you should be using is Zimmermann who costs less than $16,000.

Angels Stack

Presumably the lead off hitter and clean up hitter for the Angels today will have the platoon advantage with Kole Calhoun and Raul Ibanez facing a right-hander. Sandwiched between them should be Mike Trout and Albert Pujols. Both fell just shy of 450 PA against LHP to be in the chart above, but both have been more than good enough against same-handed pitching in the last few years. They’ll be facing the pitcher with the lowest projected point total in the chart above, Jesse Chavez.