Differences in Daily Scoring Systems

The 12:15 P.M. EST slot here on Mondays is supposed to have something to do with shortstops. Jhonny Peralta went 1-for-5 with two strikeouts last night, and Starlin Castro went 1-for-4 with a strikeout. Quota met?

I’ll get back to shortstops in short order, but without any 2015 results to parse or season long fantasy advice to give, I’m going to discuss some daily fantasy strategy. I typically play on DraftKings but have plenty of followers who play on FanDuel, and I’m taking part in an expert daily fantasy accuracy contest this season that will take place on FanDuel. For that reason, I wanted to take a quick look at how the scoring systems on each site differ.

For this exercise I took our depth chart projections and calculated the number of fantasy points per game each player is projected to score on both sites. I then calculated how far above or below average a player’s production is projected to be on one site and compared it to how far above or below average their production is projected to be on the other site. First, here are the hitters who fare better on DraftKings.

If it doesn’t jump out at you right away, all those players are pretty bad in the on-base percentage department. Because FanDuel deducts a quarter of a point for each out a player records, that scoring system rewards better OBP guys. If you just looked at the breakdown of the two scoring systems (DK, FD), this might not seem obvious because FanDuel awards the same amount of points for a walk as it does for a single, while a walk is worth two-thirds of what a single is worth on DraftKings. But the penalty for outs makes up for that difference and then some. Every player in the chart above is easily a negative contributor in the OBP category according to the auction calculator (which continues to prove useful in many scenarios). Essentially, just think of FanDuel as an OBP league and DraftKings as a batting average league.

I’d post the chart showing the flip side here, but it’s exactly what you would expect. High OBP guys like Joey Votto, Shin-Soo Choo and Carlos Santana comprise the list of players whose production is much better relative to average on FanDuel.

Now for the pitchers, here are the hurlers who fare better on DraftKings.

Damn. If Lincecum and Salazar weren’t on that list, you might confuse it for the top of a list of starter ADP.

Again, you might not expect to see these names pop up if you were to look at the two scoring systems because FanDuel only deducts points for earned runs allowed while DraftKings deducts for earned runs, hits, walks and hit batters. Moreover, both sites award points in the same three categories: innings pitched, strikeouts and wins. DraftKings does give out bonuses for shutouts, complete game shutouts and no hitters, but those are rare enough to not matter so much. Plus, I didn’t even calculate those bonuses into this exercise because we don’t have projections for those stats.

The real reason for the difference is how each site rewards those three categories. Or rather it’s how they differ in rewarding strikeouts and innings because both sites award the same number of points for a win (four). DraftKings awards two points for a strikeout and 2.25 points per inning pitched whereas FanDuel awards one point for each event. For these elite pitchers who throw more innings and strikeout more batters, the distance between them and the average pitcher grows with the larger reward for positive events.

What this tells me is that it makes less sense to spend a large portion of your allotted cap on top pitchers on FanDuel. If the gap between the elite pitchers and an average pitcher is relatively smaller, then why pay up for top notch pitching? Well, if the price on elite pitchers was closer to the price of average pitchers on the same scale as the difference in production, it would make just as much sense (or lack thereof depending on your strategy) to pay up for top pitching.

If Opening Day salaries are any indication, FanDuel is pricing top pitchers similar to how DraftKings does despite the fact that elite pitchers don’t outperform average pitchers on FanDuel like they do on DraftKings. As an example, Clayton Kershaw’s salary on DraftKings has a z-score of 2.2 today. That’s just a way of telling use how far above the mean price Kershaw’s price is. The z-score for Kershaw’s salary on FanDuel? Also 2.2. So it does indeed seem that paying up for elite pitching makes less sense on FanDuel.