DFS Reunion

We’re back from a couple of weeks on the DL, and just like actual baseball players, we got ready for our return by playing catch, though in our case it was with a couple of 9-year olds. Then, in our quest for the sabermetric equivalent of extended spring training, we sought a nice, easy research project of no particular consequence. The results of this project are set forth below.

The occasion for this particular project is the imminent return of Daily Fantasy Sports to the State of New York, where we reside. The story of how DFS came to disappear from New York in the first place and how it came to return is one about which we harbor numerous and abrasive opinions, all of which we will keep to ourselves for the moment.

We aren’t ardent DFS guys—it’s too time-consuming, too hard. But sometimes, we grow weary of our life’s work of translating the plays of Corneille into Estonian, and like to unwind with a twenty-five-cent sporting flutter. And sometimes, more to the point, our Roto season goes so sour so early—that’s you we’re glaring at, Randal Grichuk—that we need a diversion beyond what our efforts to keep our teams from finishing last provide. So we’re glad to greet DFS upon its return.

Since, as we say, we can’t give DFS the time it requires, we’re always looking for some automatic angle that stands a chance of winning. Last year, for a while, we thought we’d found one: non-prospect starting pitchers making their first major league appearance. We discovered (and advised our readers) that, in 2014 and the first half of 2015, you’d have done pretty well if you’d just used every such pitcher. Unfortunately, as we were subsequently obliged to report, the approach didn’t hold up during the second half of 2015, with the same degree of comprehensiveness with which the 17th Street Canal Levee didn’t hold up during Hurricane Katrina.

Nonetheless, we’ve cherished warm memories of Ross Stripling’s 7 1/3-inning no hitter this April, and were intoxicated by Tyler Anderson’s recent lights-out debut in Coors, so we wondered if the second half of 2015 might be a blip. It’s not. Eleven such non-prospects (whom we’ll define as pitchers who aren’t on anyone’s Top-100 list) have made their MLB debuts as starters this season, and they have produced only 3 Quality Starts: Stripling’s, Anderson’s, and Tim Adleman’s. Overall, the numbers they’ve produced are poor: 56 1/3 IP, 62 Hits, 25 BBs, 31 ERs, 47 Ks, Zero Wins, 5 Losses, 4.95 ERA, 1.54 WHIP.

But, though poor, the numbers—factoring in 2014, 2015, and 2016–aren’t so poor that just stacking your lineup with the hitters who face these pitchers is likely to be a winning strategy. And in fact, these novices’ performances aren’t that much worse than anyone else’s. You’d expect opposition hitters to hit about .260 with an OBP of about .320 against a random bunch of starting pitchers; against this bunch of 30 guys, they were .278 and .328.

It’s a different story with slugging percentage, though: .467 for the debuting starters as opposed to roughly .420 for everyone else. That’s a big difference. These guys gave up 26 home runs in 160 1/3 innings, or roughly one-third more than you’d expect. And it wasn’t a case of just a couple of guys giving up a lot of home runs (although Zach Eflin and Matt Boyd gave up three apiece).

So what do you do with this information? Well, by and large, the guys who are hitting these home runs are the guys you’d expect to hit them. Paul Goldschmidt hit two of them, and so did Josh Donaldson and Jay Bruce. If you’d confined yourself to players with demonstrated double-figure home run power, the only one you’d have missed is Ezequiel Carrera. So maybe that’s it: use those guys against a debuting non-prospect. Let’s see if it works.