Daily Fantasy Strategy — April 20 — For Draftstreet

It’s Sunday, which means a couple of things: 15 baseball games, wonderfully staggered throughout the day; weekly lineup decisions; and that you’ve probably killed a few brain cells over the past few days, so maybe you’ve forgotten some things you learned this week.

Because of that, I’m going to trial the Sunday daily beat being home to a “week in review” for the tips, charts and research our daily fantasy team does throughout the week.

Warning: CWS/TEX and PHI/COL both have a 30 percent chance of isolated thunderstorms.

Monday (Brett) – Players with reverse splits or no platoon split, and switch-hitters with platoon splits.
Wednesday (Landon) – Closer look at the A’s rotation.
Thursday (Blake) – Early team batting platoon splits.
Friday (Landon) – A few key team pitching platoon outliers.

So, we didn’t learn a great deal this week, but we’re certainly starting to get a better idea of what teams and players we need to keep an eye on when targeting value based on handedness match-ups. DraftStreet’s prices account for the platoon advantage, but there’s generally value in pitchers and batters who don’t align with the traditional assumptions.

The Daily Five
Royals stack – Phil Hughes is off to a very odd start to the season, with his FIP coming in at half of his ERA thanks to his strikeout rate spiking despite his velocity declining and him all but abandoning the slider. More importantly, he’s still not inducing a great number of groundballs, and batters have a combined line drive-fly ball rate of 63.6 percent. He’s had an above-average HR/FB rate two years running now, too, and Kauffman Stadium promises to be warm with a 13 MPH wind blowing out to left field.
Eric Hosmer – $6,255
Billy Butler – $4,249 (I’m not a fan and think something’s currently up, but this seems criminally low given the track record.)
Norichika Aoki – $5,566
Note: Salvador Perez has caught five straight days and is therefore a fairly risky play.

Jesse Chavez – $14,802
There’s been a ton of Chavez love around these parts of late, and while it’s a curious case, the set-up is damn near perfect for another great outing. Small sample sizes may still rule the day, but the Astros have already fallen to last in the majors with a .272 wOBA, and they’re striking out 25.2 percent of the time.

Dustin Pedroia – $6,804
This is more just a vote against Ubaldo Jimenez, who has looked terrible so far. There are a few other nice Sox options, too, but this is the daily five, not daily fill your whole lineup out for you. Jimenez has been friendly to righties over the past two seasons and Pedroia had seventeen singles and nine extra base hits off of the 382 fastballs slower than 91 MPH he saw last season (he swung and missed on just 11).

This post, covering one of the leading sites for daily fantasy, is sponsored and made possible by the generous support of Draftstreet. FanGraphs maintains complete editorial control of the postings, and brings you these posts in a continued desire to provide the best analytical information on the latest in baseball.

We know you play in all sorts of leagues. So to help you fine-tune the analysis you’d like to read, we’ve added three tags to the categories on the right: Roto, Head to Head, and Daily Fantasy Update. Use these to get the information that is most relevant to your leagues!