Archive for streaming

In recent articles, I’ve mentioned several times that Ottoneu uses a soft innings cap of 1,500 for the season. This allows you to go past the the cap on the day you reach it. (This is hardly specific to Ottoneu as Yahoo uses the same rules with innings caps). However, given the point structure many Ottoneu leagues implement there is an inherent advantage of pitching more innings that does not exist in 5×5 or 4×4 leagues. In 4×4 or 5×5 you could maybe boost your W, SV, or K (counting stats), but you could also lower your ratios if the stack of pitchers you employ have a sub-par outing. FanGraphs and SABR points leagues are a little different. In points leagues, as long as a pitcher doesn’t go negative (perform very badly) you will accrue points just by pitching more innings. As we enter the final week of the season I wanted to provide a list of all probable pitchers till the end of the year to help your schedule out those final 50-80 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I identified potential stolen base streamers for daily fantasy leagues and weekly leagues with daily transactions and lineup changes. I used a pitcher’s career caught-stealing and pick-off rates as criteria to determine if a particular matchup was primed for streaming a speedster with the hope of him stealing a base (or two or four).

I like how it turned out, but it felt hastily constructed. A pitcher’s career rate seemed too broad a scope, especially considering the possibility that a pitcher can get better (or, perhaps, worse) at limiting steals and picking off runners over time.

With a little more time and care, I fleshed out everything a bit more and added an additional criterion: catcher effectiveness, which can be most obviously measured by caught-stealing rate. But I think there also is merit to calculating the frequency at which runners attempt to steal on a catcher. In a sense, it measure runners’ perception of a catcher’s skill, especially for those at the tails of the distribution.

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I’m really not privy to the whole daily fantasy baseball thing, as proctored by FanDuel or DraftKings. It’s probably good that I’m not because I’m 98 percent certain I would immediately fall in love with it.

Still, I’m intrigued, mostly because it takes streaming to the extreme. And I love streaming. It’s a tedious, somewhat painstaking process, what with combing through splits, looking for the juiciest matchups that are also cost-effective.
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