The Daily Grind: Cash Games, Sanchez, Lester
Agenda
- DFS Cash Game Strategy
- Daily DFS – Sanchez
- Tomorrow’s Targets – Porcello, Lester, Valencia, Orlando
- Factor Grid
1. DFS Cash Game Strategy
Those of you already playing DFS probably have a good idea of where this is going. Still, it’s wise to occasionally re-orient yourself with the basics. By “cash game,” I’m referring mostly to head-to-head play. However, the same ideas apply to non-tournament style DFS contests.
In the big tournaments, your job is to maximize your ceiling. Then you hope it all works out knowing that you’ll be wrong more often than not. Cash games are about managing ceiling and floor.
There’s a general formula to building a good roster. Start with a reliable pitcher – often one of the most expensive of the day. There are certain types of hitters you want to target. Ideally, you’re looking for guys who are high in the batting order of a visiting team at a hitter’s park. Obviously, you’ll want to adjust for quality of matchup as well as handedness and batted ball splits.
Avoid high strikeout power hitters like Chris Carter or Pedro Alvarez. This is where managing the floor comes into the equation. All things equal, it can be better to have a Melky Cabrera over Carter simply because you know Cabrera will put the ball in play.
Don’t stack*. The less reliant you are on one roster, the better. You’ll be left in rough shape if you bet against Kyle Kendrick at Coors and he somehow only gives up four runs. Diversification is your friend.
The above is meant to be very basic. If you’d like to discuss anything else related to cash games, let’s reconvene in the comments.
*Stacking is when you take multiple players from one lineup so runs and RBI are double counted.
2. Daily DFS – Sanchez
Early: We have eight games in the early contest for Thin Thursday. Let’s talk about home runs and Anibal Sanchez.
To date, Sanchez has allowed five home runs in 16.1 innings. At a high level, there are two scenarios we can consider.
1. Something is wrong and we should expect an elevated home run rate
2. We’re observing a random fluctuation and we should expect better numbers
Of course, we need more data or scouting expertise to test which of these hypotheses is truer. I’ve included a heat map of Sanchez’s home runs below. The pitch distribution included two fastballs, two sliders, and one cutter. I didn’t look to see which is which.
One of those pitches is not like the other. The remaining four are all locations that often yield poor results. For DFS purposes, you have a choice. Do you bet he’ll continue to serve up gopher balls on a pupu platter, or will he throw like vintage Sanchez. Depending on your opinion, you could justify stacking Yankees or starting Sanchez.
For what it’s worth, the conditions are terrible for home runs today.
Late: Four games are late. Jesse Chavez and Nick Tropeano will make their 2015 debuts as starters. I’m interested in the game because I happen to like both pitchers. There are also issues with the pitchers from the other three games. It’s certainly safer to cast your lot with Chris Sale or Jake Odorizzi.
Stack Targets: Jeff Locke, David Phelps, Dustin McGowan, Homer Bailey, Kyle Lohse, Mike Bolsinger, Ryan Vogelsong, Clay Buchholz
3. Tomorrow’s Targets – Porcello, Lester, Valencia, Orlando
Pitchers to Start: Rick Porcello has struggled with his control through three starts. He doesn’t rack up strikeouts or shut down the opposing offense. This recommendation is all about chasing the win. Porcello is opposed by Miguel Gonzalez. I expect the Red Sox lineup to go bonkers off the homer prone starter.
Also consider: Aaron Harang, Danny Salazar, Drew Smyly, Carlos Martinez
Pitchers to Exploit: I had trouble deciding whether I should count Jon Lester as a possible exploit. He’s certainly not the first guy I would target, but let’s talk about him.
Lester will face a decent Reds lineup, but the hitters aren’t the biggest story. The Reds are one of the most aggressive teams on the base paths. The club leads the majors with 17 steals (nine of which are Billy Hamilton). Lester is ridiculously bad when it comes to pickoff moves, so expect further aggression today.
I imagine this whole pickoff debacle is in Lester’s head. He’s always had the problem, but it’s just recent became a national story. Until he finds a solution in which he’s confident, I expect uneven performances from him.
Also consider: Miguel Gonzalez, Mat Latos, Jose Quintana, Chris Heston, Eddie Butler
Hitters (power): I haven’t had many chances to plug Danny Valencia. He’ll face lefty Smyly in his 2015 debut. Valencia is a career .332/.371/.508 hitter against southpaws. Unfortunately, the game is at Tropicana Field.
Also consider: Travis Snider, Brock Holt, Marlon Byrd, C.J. Cron, Dustin Ackley, Seth Smith
Hitters (speed): I don’t know anything about Paulo Orlando. Well that’s not quite true – I know he has eight hits and five triples on the season. I also know he’ll have the platoon advantage against Quintana.
Also consider: Alejandro De Aza, Danny Espinosa, Nori Aoki, Angel Pagan, Collin Cowgill
4. The Factor Grid
The table below indicates which stadiums have the best conditions for hitters today. The color coding is a classic stoplight where green equals go for hitters. The weather conditions are from SI Weather’s home run app. A 10/10 means great atmospheric conditions for home runs. A 1/10 means lousy atmospheric conditions.
The Link. Colorado looks awfully inviting today. Otherwise, you’ll probably want to target a roofed park.
This post is not brought to you by any DFS platform. The current author is quite pleased to present a DFS ad free environment.
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gb/fb splits?
Jeff didn’t run them today. I’m working on getting the necessary technology to run them myself 🙂
You at least want to mini-stack, even in head-to-heads.
Also, I would recommend checking game and team totals. Let the market due the work. At that point, you know which teams to stack based on the highest projected team totals.
You’re probably better off playing the 50/50’s than the head to heads. I believe the average score to place int he 50/50’s was slightly lower than that of head to heads at the same buy-in levels last year.
I tend to agree on mini-stacking in 50/50s, and checking lines to figure out which games to stack. I prefer to get guys with the platoon advantage as opposed to focusing just on guys hitting back-to-back in the lineup. For a tourney, I prefer as big a stack as possible from one team, then patch in other guys as appropriate. For 50/50s, if I can get two stacks of 3, that’s ideal. I tend to spend a bit more on pitching in 50/50s, going for sure things. Of course that didn’t work too well with David Price last night.
What’s the logic in stacking in H2H? Seems like all you’re adding is variance, which is what you want for tournies (since you’re aiming for an extreme result) but pointless in H2H.
My thought in doing it is that if you have two mini-stacks in a cash game, you have that much better chance of at least one of them going off and minimizing under-performance elsewhere in your lineup (like last night when Price got shelled, I still cashed in my cash game). You are adding some variance, but even in a cash game it’s good to build in some increased upside.
I read some DFS ebook (I think it was Jonathan Bales’s “Fantasy Baseball for Smart People”) which used DraftKings data to show that lineups that stacked 3 or 4 players from the same team tended to actually have both a higher ceiling and a higher floor than teams that didn’t stack at all or had a maximum of two players from the same team on them. Now when you get to a stack of 5 or 6, you really are putting a lot on that one team breaking through, that’s more high-risk high-reward. Two mini-stacks may be higher-variance than just one, it just kind of depends on how things come together. I’m not a big believer in total lineup diversity though, on any given night there are only so many favorable ballpark/opposing pitcher/weather/handedness/vegas line things that all come together.
Take it for what it’s worth but it’s served me reasonably well.
The totals market is really efficient in baseball – a lot of money invested into it each and everyday.
You should be heavily invested into the highest totaled games. Using today as an example:
The Rockies vs Padres total is 10 1/2
O’s vs Toronto total is 9
Angels vs Oakland total is 8
Every other total on the board today is 7 or under currently.
Given the value/importance of runs and RBI’s in daily, and the correlation between hits and runs scored, it wouldn’t be ideal strategy to not stack those lineups. I’m at the office so I can’t access my accounts, but you can look even further into those numbers by looking at actual team totals to decide which team would be the better stack tonight in those match-ups.
Trying to pick individual match-ups – especially considering that most bat vs pitch data is complete noise because the samples just aren’t there (exceptions being people like Raburn vs Danks) – is just too random. By stacking players that connect (that does not mean back to back, I’ll usually do players within 4 spots of the batting order), in games with the highest projected totals, you are much more likely to have consistent production.
The ideal lineups will feature the games in which the most runs are scored; given that fact, you’d be a little off not to mini-stack the games with the highest projected totals.
Baseball has more variance in general than basketball – in terms of fantasy return, at least from my experience. I didn’t have a losing week in daily fantasy basketball this year, but I had 2-3 losing stretches last year in baseball before hitting a big one. There’s more variance in baseball in general because every single player has a lesser own rate than that of basketball.
Brad, in tournament play, how do you look for pitchers to select. Do you look for cheap upside so that you can spend more on hitters or still opt for the more reliable options? Also, can you recommend any other resources for evaluating daily picks? Is there anywhere to look at splits without having to look up every player’s profile page? I have found dailybaseballdata helpful for some things but they really focus on BvP data which I don’t put much stock in.
It depends on the day. For GPPs, you’re looking for a monster outing, so you have to pick a guy who can legitimately pitch 7-9 innings. If I can find a guy who fits that profile in the bargain bin, then I’ll give him a try. Usually, I wind up with somebody relatively safe.
I reference individual pages. I’m sure such resources exist, but I have a lot of this stuff memorized. And if I forget to mention an obvious play, somebody is always quick to call me out 🙂
excellent chance this is just noise, but has anyone looked into day game/night game splits? I ask because I remember reading an article years ago that Josh Hamilton struggled during day games because he has blue eyes (which seemed odd at first but seemed legit since I also have blue eyes and performed much better during night games than day games). Further, players may have different body clocks and some players may not be disciplined to stay in the night before a day game. Don’t have the time to stress test this theory, so I hoped this discussion has come up. Obviously this knowledge would help an “early only” tournament.
Why are the park factors listed here different than the ones on the official fangraphs listing?
The ones on the Guts page have been halved for use on full season data.
That’s funny, I just put Paulo on my watch list in our league, but sort of have no clue why.
I’m sorry, I just don’t get H2Hs. If you win 60% of H2Hs, you only win 8% on your $$$? Should be higher considering that 60% is a reach when all the stats we have in the world are narrowed to just one game.
I can see playing the big tournaments as a lottery ticket, but the H2Hs seem like an itch that a season long league with daily transactions can scratch.
For H2Hs, check lineups frequently. Expected lineup place is priced in to salaries, and it’s one of the only meaningful pieces of data that’s frequently adjusted after salaries have been set. A guy who usually bats 8th batting 2nd is getting on average an additional full plate appearence which can make him a huge value if his price has been set with the assumption he’s batting 8th. Bench players who don’t usually start are also often great values when they’re inserted into the lineup.