Archive for Daily Fantasy Strategy

Dan Straily| Oakland Athletics | @ Seattle on Friday

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like Dan Straily has been around for awhile. In reality, he’s still very much a prospect. He made his tenth major league start yesterday and has just over 50 career big league innings. And he’s a good prospect. He displayed good strikeout and walks skills throughout the minors, especially in the upper minors. His BB% was under 8% in stops at A+, AA, and AAA, and his K% was above 30% in about 150 innings of work at AA and AAA. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Cashner | San Diego Padres | @ Cubs on Wednesday

Cashner is your typical young flamethrower who racks up strikeouts but struggles with control. In 130 career innings, he has a 25% K% and 10.5% BB%. In eight career starts he has a 25.7% K% and 4.4% BB%. That’s probably a small sample size anomaly, but there’s a chance that the windup suits him.

But Cashner has another skill beyond just the strikeout ability; he gets a ton of groundballs. His career ground ball rate is 51.3%. If he can keep that rate up as a full-time starter, he’ll join some pretty elite company. In the last ten years, there have only been three pitchers with a full season of 24%+ K% and 50%+ GB% at the age of 27 or younger. Those three were Jon Lester, Francisco Liriano, and David Price. Read the rest of this entry »

Felix Doubront | Boston Red Sox | Home to Oakland and home to Houston

Doubront is listed here simply because he’s widely available and gets two decent matchups next week. While it would be preferable if the starts were on the road (especially the one against Oakland), they are good enough that weekly players should give Doubront a look in H2H matchups, and daily players should give him a long look in the latter matchup.

Doubront has several problems; he issues too many walks (10% BB% in 2012), he gives up too many home runs (15.9% HR/FB), and he gives up a fair amount of hard contact (23.4% LD%). If reading that is sufficiently scary, feel free to skip to the next pitcher. But he does have the alluring ability to miss bats, and he has the ability to get strikeouts. Among pitchers with 160+ IP last year, Doubront ranked 28th in SwStr% and 17th in K%.

With the poor run prevention skills listed above, you wouldn’t be wrong to ignore Doubront. But if you’re in the market for a cheap option in daily cap leagues or desperate for a two-start option, you could do worse than Doubront with his strikeout skills and decent macthups. Read the rest of this entry »

The value of a stolen base may vary from daily site to daily site, but on the site where I play my daily cap contests, a steal is worth five points. Throw in the fact that a runner has to get on base to be able to steal another one and a steal becomes worth seven or eight points. And that’s assuming they don’t come around to score or do anything else in their other plate appearances. You could certainly do worse than seven or eight points from a slot. Needless to say, I like guys who can run a little (or a lot) in daily leagues.

In order to be able to better pick base stealers in daily salary cap formats, I decided to look at the pitchers and catchers who are the most and least friendly to base stealers. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I listed some guys to target and avoid in daily, salary-cap formats based on platoon splits. That’s just one factor to consider when picking a daily cap lineup, and a commenter mentioned another interesting factor worth considering:

This seemed like a great idea, so below I’ll be identifying the certain pitcher-hitter matchups to exploit in daily cap formats. Read the rest of this entry »

The daily salary cap format has become much more prevalent in the past few years. I would imagine a large part of that has to do with the fact that daily fantasy sites have figured out a good way to monetize fantasy sports. But those sites couldn’t make money if we didn’t like playing the format.

If you’re thinking of trying the format out, or if you play and are looking for thoughts on strategy, allow me to describe the strategy I employ.

Let me start by noting that I’m not a huge fan of risk, so I generally play low-risk, low-reward games like double ups, which pay out roughly the top half of the entrants each day. You get the same payout as a head-to-head matchup, but you don’t have to take on the risk of having just one opponent. As a result, my strategy might not be best suited for those who like to play the “lottery ticket” type games where you risk a small amount of money to win a big pot against a lot of other players. You need upside and luck to win those pools.

My strategy begins with the idea that you should save on pitchers when possible. There are quite a few guys I’m higher on than most, so I target them because they’re usually underpriced in my opinion. If I can’t find two bargain pitchers, I’ll just pick a stud with a good matchup to go along with a bargain. Depending on how much money I can save on pitching, I prefer to grab as many high priced hitters as possible. Hitting is just so variable day-to-day, so I’m willing to pay for the guys who go oh-fer less often.

When choosing hitters, the number one thing I look at is platoon splits. I want to pick guys who are really good against pitchers of a certain handedness and who happen to be facing such a pitcher on that day. Other factors like the park and the skill of the opposing pitcher come in to play, but platoon splits are the biggest consideration.

When you can’t find bargain pitching and don’t have much money to spend on hitters, splits can help you find undervalued players. And when you have a lot of money to spend on hitting, it’s important that you be careful not to pick good hitters who struggle against pitchers of a certain handedness.

To help me pick players each day, I created a spreadsheet with a tab listing all players who had 100 or more plate appearances against lefties last year and a tab with all players who had 240 or more plate appearances against righties. I used a different number of plate appearances because there are more plate appearances to be had against righties. I wanted to look at players who got a fair number of plate appearances against pitchers of a certain handedness.

I listed each player’s wRC+ alongside their name. I chose wRC+ because it easily allows you to see how far above average that player is against pitchers of a certain handedness. The league average wRC+ is 100, so if a guy has a wRC+ of 140 against LHP, that means he’s 40% better than average against lefties.

Below are four lists. The purpose of each list is:

• Identifying potentially underpriced options against LHP
• Identifying good hitters to avoid when they are facing LHP
• Identifying potentially underpriced options against RHP
• Identifying good hitters to avoid when they are facing RHP

For the potentially underpriced options, I listed guys with who aren’t owned in all leagues (with one exception) on the assumption that guys with lower ownership percentages will usually have lower prices on daily sites. I also tried to list at least a guy or two from each position. For good guys to avoid, I listed big name guys with high ownership percentages. Enjoy!