Using Points per Game Started to Evaluate Hitters

Every fantasy format plays a little differently and, as a result, every fantasy formats has a unique way to measure value. In points leagues, we tend to look at points per game (P/G). This seems logical enough. When you draft or add or trade for players and when you set your lineups, you want to pick the guys who will score the most points when they are in the lineup. So you try to max out P/G. Easy peasy.

Except P/G isn’t actually the right measure of player value. You do want a ratio with points scored in the numerator, but the “games” is the wrong denominator. The correct denominator depends on whether you have daily or weekly lineups, and that can have a real impact on who you target in drafts and who you plug into your lineup.

For daily leagues, your denominator should be looking at points per game started (P/GS). For weekly leagues, you should be looking at points per week (P/Wk). Today, we are going to focus on daily leagues – though I’ll have some notes on weekly leagues as we go, as well.

The reason to rate players  P/GS instead of P/G is simply because in daily leagues you aren’t using guys who don’t start. Here’s an example:

Imagine you are playing a standard ESPN points league and have two first basemen on your roster and you are picking who will start each day. Over a week-long stretch, both players play seven games. Both players score 14 points (2 P/G is roughly what Ryan O’Hearn put up in ESPN leagues last year). You could argue that it doesn’t matter who you start (and in a weekly league, you would be right). But what if their performances looked like this:

If that’s what happened, starting Player A every time he is in the lineup and using Player B the other two games would have netted you an expected 16 points – more than either player got individually.

The reason is that Player A is a better hitter! He put up 2.4 points per game when he started, while Player B only put up 2.

This example is a bit simplistic. Player A could have hit a homer in one of those PH appearances and that would totally skew this. But over the course of a full season, you would expect things like that to come out in the wash. Yes, a player might have a great game thanks to one great PA as a PH, but they will also put up a lot of zeroes (or worse) as a pinch hitter.

The thing is, when you go look at a leaderboard for points leagues, you can almost always sort by P/G, but rarely can you sort by P/GS. And this creates an opportunity for the savvy manager to find bargains by identifying players whose is effective on a per-game-started basis but whose P/G looks bad (or at least worse) and deflates their perceived value.

Using Stathead from Baseball Reference, I pulled overall and “as-starter” leaderboards for 2025 hitters with at least 250 PA as a starter. This left me with 298 players. I then calculated their P/G and P/GS for all of those players for standard points scoring at Yahoo, ESPN, and Ottoneu, to try to find players who stand out by P/GS.

An important note: you have to use as-starter splits, and not simply take total points divided by games started. And you can’t just look at points per at bat or plate appearance. Guys who pinch hit a lot may also get pulled often for a pinch hitter or defensive replacement. Looking at points-scored-as-a-starter divided by games started is the way to measure this.

Let’s look at who stands out, starting with ESPN.

ESPN

Here are the eight players who rank in the top 100 by P/GS in ESPN default points scoring and whose P/GS is at least 0.25 points  greater than their P/G.

For the most part, these are players whose value is already established. I don’t think anyone needs this data point to tell them to draft Michael Busch or Drake Baldwin. But this does give you good reason to consider pushing these two up your daily points league draft boards. Baldwin, for example, is the 65th ranked hitter on this list by P/G, which puts him seven slots worse than William Contreras. But by P/GS, Baldwin jumps to 27th while Contreras sits 76th. In 2025, if you had both of those guys on your roster, you would have seen Contreras listed at 2.41 P/G and Baldwin at 2.39, but if they were both in their teams’ lineups on a given night, starting Baldwin would have been the right call (at least on average – matchups, parks, weather, etc. can obviously skew this).

Busch, Abreu, Rice, Horwitz, and Muncy are all left-handed hitters who get days off vs. left-handed starting pitchers, but would get appearances late in games that skew their P/G downward. Abreu, for example, had three games played last year with 0 PA and nine more with 1 PA. He even had six games he didn’t start but ended up with 2 PA.

In daily leagues, P/G downplays the value these guys bring. Look at Busch compared to Pete Alonso:

It is not quite fair to say “Busch is just as valuable as Alonso.” Thirty extra games started has real value. Busch requires you to have another 1B-eligible player on your bench who you can use to fill out those additional games played, and that player won’t match the 2.7 P/G you get from Alonso. But the comparison is much closer than P/G makes it look.

It’s also worth noting that in weekly leagues, these players – even someone like Busch who made 131 starts and 155 appearances – are overvalued by P/G. In that Busch/Alonso comparison, the difference between the two in weekly leagues is both 0.38 P/G and seven fewer games played. When those lost games are due to platoon splits (rather than injury) you don’t get to replace that player in your lineup when they are out, so the lost games are just straight lost.

Miguel Andujar and Romy Gonzalez are a different story. They are both right-handed bats that sit often against right-handed pitching. And that really deflates their value. If waiting on Busch instead of taking Alonso means you need to find 30 extra games of points at first base; taking Andujar or Gonzalez is much more punishing – they started 80 and 76 games, respectively, last year. Unless you have really deep rosters (like Ottoneu’s 40-man rosters), they just aren’t worth holding.

Yahoo

Yahoo’s default scoring leads to much higher P/G totals and weights things a bit diferently, but we still get a lot of overlap. Here are the nine players who are at least 0.8 better on a P/GS basis than a P/G basis and are in the top 100 by P/GS.

More than half of this list are repeats from the last list – Baldwin, Abreu, Busch, Gonzalez, Rice. The other four names follow a similar pattern. Carpenter and Grisham are both left-handed bats who sit against same-handed pitching. And like their counterparts on the ESPN list, you need to be cautious with them in weekly leagues (or particularly shallow leagues) but they can provide a little extra boost to your lineup in daily leagues.

Collins and Domínguez are a different story. Both are switch hitters, so they don’t follow expected platoon norms. They were basically just players who didn’t play everyday but brought something to the table that got them into games they didn’t start. For Domínguez, it was mostly his speed and glove. He PH seven times, but also had seven appearances as a pinch runner and a number of appearances as a defensive replacement. Collins, meanwhile, PH 20 times and made a number of appearances as a defensive replacement.

Of the two, Collins is perhaps the more interesting one when you look at this split. While he and Domínguez make similar gains when viewed on a per-start basis, Domínguez looks like he is stuck in a similar role this year. He made 123 appearances and 102 starts in 2025 and enters 2026 just as buried – maybe even more so – thanks to the returns of Cody Bellinger and Trent Grisham. Roster Resource doesn’t even have Domínguez on the roster.

Collins, meanwhile, made 130 appearances and 100 starts last year, but the trade to Kansas City should give him a much clearer path to regular playing time. If you look at his 2025 P/G, you see a pretty borderline hitter for default Yahoo points scoring. But if you take his 2025 performance and assume he’ll be a near-full-time starter this year, he’s a top 100 bat. I don’t think he will maintain his performance in 2026, but if you disagree, there is an opportunity to profit.

Ottoneu

Moving to Ottoneu, here are the 10 bats who are in the top 100 by P/GS and are worth at least 0.55 more P/G as a starter than overall:

Again, a lot of overlap. Busch, Baldwin, Abreu, Rice, Gonzalez, Carpenter, Andujar, and Horwitz have all appeared on previous lists. And the story here is basically the same, with the added bonus that Ottoneu’s 40-man rosters make it even easier to use platoon bats. In a league with only five or six bench spots, you can only afford to roster so many platoon guys. In a league with 18 bench spots (even if those spots also need to account for minor leaguers, injured players, etc.), you can play matchups more often and really take advantage of these guys. Even Andujar and Gonzalez have some value here, even though I don’t think they do in the other formats.

The top and bottom names on this list are new. Marte made 120 appearances and just 74 starts in 2025 and there isn’t a clear L/R platoon usage pattern here. From 8/21 through the end of the season, he made 21 starts and 12 were against lefties. The Mets did seem to prioritize using him vs. lefties when possible, but he wasn’t locked into the lineup against southpaws or to the bench vs. righties.

The big challenge with Marte, of course, is that he is unemployed. That may not last long – someone will have interest in a solid defensive corner OF who had a 112 wRC+ and projects to have a league-average bat this year, even if he is 37-years-old. If he does land a job, I would bet on regression pulling his P/GS down quite a bit this year. But if you look at a 2025 leaderboard or his player page and see 3.83 P/G, that seriously undervalues what he produced last year. That looks like a guy who shouldn’t be on your radar, but he could easily be a replacement-level type hitter in this format.

Aranda has a different challenge. He was excellent even on a P/G basis and even more excellent on a P/GS basis. There isn’t much reason to think his skills will regress and his role should be basically the same. The Rays love a good platoon. Aranda made 96 starts and 106 appearances last year, but also missed a few weeks on the IL. He missed 49 games on the IL, so when healthy, he started all but 17 games and appeared in all but seven. Ten of the 17 games he didn’t start were before mid-May. So I would expect him to start more often this year than he did last year, and continue to appear as a PH in basically every game he doesn’t start.

That all seems good, but he is also moving back to Tropicana Field from the Rays temporary home at Steinbrenner Field, and that will take a toll. He’s a good enough hitter that I still think he will be excellent, but maybe not quite as excellent. Regardless of how much he regresses, don’t let his P/G fool you. His P/G suggest he was somewhere in the Cody Bellinger/Julio Rodriguez range last year, but on a per-game-started basis, he was more like Pete Alonso or Bobby Witt Jr. There is room to regress from that and still be a star.