Daily Fantasy Strategy — May 15 — For Draftstreet

I often cite wOBA in these daily fantasy posts, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t misleading by repeatedly mentioning a stat that doesn’t mesh well with the DraftStreet scoring system.

As a refresher, here is what is included in wOBA: unintentional walks, hit by pitch, singles, doubles, triples, home runs, and plate appearances.

Here is what is included in DraftStreet scoring: walks, hut by pitch, singles, doubles, triples, home runs, runs, RBI, stolen bases and strikeouts.

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That’s not too far off, but strikeouts, stolen bases and run production loom as factors outside of wOBA that could skew things. So I pulled Fantasy Points Per Game from DraftStreet and ran a quick regression with a few different stats for qualified hitters. As it turns out, using wOBA as a shorthand for “hitter performance” doesn’t lead us too far astray. It’s not perfect, and context remains important, but it’s not bad either.

R2
FPPG/wOBA 0.66
FPPG/K 0.08
FPPG/HR/pa 0.27

The Daily Five
Indians Stack – Cleveland draws Jays’ lefty J.A. Happ, who is about as up-and-down as they come and has had occasional home run struggles at Rogers Centre. What’s more, his three-year track record is without strong platoon splits, and Vegas loves this game to the tune of a 9.5 over/under.
Carlos Santana – $5,102 (turning the corner)
Asdrubal Cabrera – $6,215
Nick Swisher – $5,603 (far better against lefties)
Ryan Raburn – $4,414 (can’t possibly keep struggling)

C.J. Cron – $5,725
What can I say, I’m a fan, and the young righty draws lefty Erik Bedard in a game expected to produce some solid scoring. Cron’s off to a nice start to his career despite the early 0.0 percent walk rate, and he was generally even more dangerous against southpaws throughout his minor league tenure (.912 OPS versus an .807 against righties).

Wei-Yin Chen – $15,811
The Royals have a .293 wOBA against lefties despite rarely striking out, an odd combination that shows, like last year, a considerable lack of pop against southpaws. Chen has several positive indicators in his underlying profile and is moderately priced on a day with few great bargains.

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.





Blake Murphy is a freelance sportswriter based out of Toronto. Formerly of the Score, he's the managing editor at Raptors Republic and frequently pops up at Sportsnet, Vice, and around here. Follow him on Twitter @BlakeMurphyODC.

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Brian
9 years ago

Can you show me the correlation with slugging percentage?