I live in a small town in Colorado. Probably the most exciting thing about this place is that it has a Walmart Supercenter, a small movie theater, and my wife. Seriously, those three entities sometimes form the core of my Friday night — if I’m lucky.
This is the 46th installment of The Labyrinthian, a series dedicated to exploring random fields of knowledge in order to give you unordinary theoretical, philosophical, strategic, and/or often rambling guidance on daily fantasy sports. Consult the introductory piece to the series for further explanation.
What It’s Like to Live Here
Our local movie house is the Ski-Hi 6 Theatre. On the one hand, the British spelling of “theatre” gives the place a theoretical air of elegance. On the other hand, the odds are higher than zero that the proprietors simply misspelled “theater” and got lucky.
If you bothered to click on the link for the theater, you’ll notice that you were directed to a Facebook page. That’s because the theater doesn’t have a website. It uses its Facebook page as if it were an official website.
If you wanted to find out what movies are there or when they’re playing, until relatively recently you couldn’t find that information on Fandango or similar sites. You’d have to visit the f*cking Facebook page, as if you were a teenager cyberstalking that random hottie from your English class.
This theater literally might be the only one I’ve been in that actively patrols PG-13 and R movies to ensure that underage children aren’t watching movies without parental supervision. Note that I didn’t say “adult supervision.” I said “parental supervision.” That I actually know — as one who doesn’t have children — that this theater considers the distinction between adult and parental supervision to be significant should tell you pretty much all that you need to know.
And when I say that the theater actively patrols PG-13 and R movies, I don’t mean that the person selling you tickets checks your driver’s license to make sure that you’re old enough to see the movie for which you’re buying tickets. I mean that this theater has people who actually roam the premises, shine flashlights on people, and sincerely hope to catch them watching movies that they aren’t allowed to see.
If I were making this up, I wouldn’t have thought to make this up.
Right now, on the six screens are four PG movies. I didn’t know that even that many PG movies had been made this year. Anyway, I guess that my wife and I are lucky enough that one of those PG movies happens to be something that we wouldn’t mind seeing — The Huntsman: Winter’s War.
Charlize Theron and My Movie-Watching Existence
Just to be clear: I doubt that my wife and I both think that The Huntsman: Winter’s War is going to be good. (It probably helps, though, that Kristen Stewart isn’t in it.) Rather, I’m about 93 percent sure that the reason we’ll see this movie someday is that we both have an unspoken crush on Charlize Theron.
We don’t see movies all that often, but when we do it’s usually because my wife has a crush on the leading ladies. As it turns out, I normally don’t mind seeing those movies — because my wife and I have similar tastes in actresses.
One of the actresses we both like is Theron. Seriously, ever since the time I first saw her do that thing she does in That Thing You Do! — and it’s hard to believe that was 20 years ago — I’ve been a pretty regular worshipper at the Theron temple.
I once almost watched Mighty Joe Young just because she was in it. I didn’t — because I still have some filmic standards — but that I even considered it says something . . . about me.
Anyway, I’ll probably see The Huntsman: Winter’s War soon because my wife will want to see it and I won’t mind looking at Theron for a couple of hours while some plot takes place in the background.
This is my life. Why should I pretend that it isn’t?
We Need More Metrics for Movies
All of this brings me to something that will eventually bring me to something else that will happen to be related to DFS.
We need more metrics for movies. Some film metrics already exist, but they aren’t available to the public, and I want some numbers to back up what I’m about to say: Theron is an above-replacement-level thespian.
That might seem like an obvious statement, since she won an Academy Award for her leading role in Monster and was nominated for a second for her performance in North Country. But there are some people who win Academy Awards who aren’t really better than the average actor.
Exhibit A: Cuba Gooding Jr.
Theron is consistently strong. She makes every movie that she is in better. She’s not Meryl Streep — she might not even be Diane Keaton — but I’ve never seen a movie with Theron and afterwards thought, “This really would’ve been better if someone else had been cast for her role.”
At the same time, for someone who is a good actress, she has been in a remarkably small number of truly good films, especially for someone who has been regularly making movies for just over two decades.
Monster was great and Mad Max: Fury Road was arguably very good — but of the movies in which she is a leading actor a relatively low percentage are good. And of the movies in which she is a supporting actor most of the good films would’ve been good anyway if she hadn’t been in them.
I’m highlighting this difference between Theron and her films for a couple of reasons:
- It explains why, despite Theron’s skill, most people tend not to think of her as a truly great actress.
- It reminds us that we shouldn’t confuse a person’s production with the context in which that production occurs or with the larger effort to which that person contributes.
Theron is an underappreciated actress because, even though she makes her movies better, in the aggregate they aren’t very good. The value of her acting contributions are obscured by the relative worth of her films.
[Side Note: I swear that I will tie this “Theron is good even if her movies are unimpressive” theme into the second part of the article (if I don’t forget to do so).]
Let’s Talk About Debt, Baby
I’ve been thinking about various ways of measuring the contributions that athletes make to their professional franchises. Specifically, I’ve been exploring ways of measuring the specific impacts that they make on their teammates.
For instance, in the NFL how much of a running back’s per-game production is due to the skill of his quarterback? In the NBA, how much of a shooting guard’s production is tied to the pace at which his point guard plays? I’ve even been thinking about NASCAR: How much of a driver’s success can be attributed to decisions made by other drivers on the same racing team?
Basically, what I’m talking about can be thought of as fantasy debt. In a positive scenario, when a player is beneficially impacted by another player, what percentage of his production does the first player owe to the second? Or, in a negative sense, when a player is deleteriously impacted by another player, what production does the second player (metaphorically) owe the first one?
Even though I think that the stock market analogy is overused for DFS, I’ve written several articles that use ideas or strategies from finance: the yield curve, value investing, writing covered call options, and the price-to-earnings ratio, for instance. But no financial idea is more important (or fundamental to who are individually and socially) as “debt.”
The moment that we decided as a species that we were fine with the idea of “you give me X now and I will owe you X and maybe something extra later,” civilization was created. The moment that we decided that someone’s “debt to society” could be paid through some justice system that didn’t read “an eye for an eye” literally, humans became humane. How we think about debt determines or at least reveals how we live and who we are.
I’m Indebted to Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I started writing this piece on Monday morning. By the time I returned to it on Tuesday evening, the idea for this section had escaped my memory.
It’s too bad. This was going to be the part of the article that explained everything about DFS in just a few sentences.
D*mn. You got really unlucky.
#Randomness
The Proper Valuation of Designated Hitters
Designated hitters are like the Charlize Therons of MLB DFS. They are sexy and generally they can smash — but from a DFS perspective their offenses aren’t really impressive.
They’re undisputed sources of fantasy debt, in that they stimulate the economies of their offenses — their teammates tend to accumulate additional raw production because of them — but, as I pointed out in yesterday’s Trend of the Day, American League hitters tend to underperform in DFS contexts (despite the presence of DHs in their lineups).
I want to explore the Theron-esque quality of DHs a little more in this section. Is this trend really true? Do DHs both make their MLB lineups better and participate in DFS offenses that underwhelm from a Plus/Minus perspective?
In the TOTD article, I simply looked at the performances of AL batters and compared them to the performances of their National League counterparts.
Pretty simple.
DHs in Their Native Environments
But those trends could include some games in which the sample is muddied — those instances in which AL and NL teams play each other, for instance.
So let’s see what happens when we get some old-school, intraleague-only AL action, in which two teams built to play with DHs go against each other:
It’s even worse.
And what about NL-only action, in which we see competing two teams that are accustomed to having pitchers (pretend to) bat?
Yep.
Whenever AL and NL batters compete in their native environments — against teams in their own leagues — the disparity in their salary-adjusted production increases. Even though DHs provide fantasy debt to their teammates and improve the overall production of their MLB teams, they are regularly in lineups that underperform from a DFS perspective.
Interleague Play: NL DHs and Other Oddities
Finally, let’s look at interleague play, which might be able to provide us with a more accurate sense of a DH’s influence.
What happens when a team that normally doesn’t use a DH — an average NL team that normally has a positive Plus/Minus even with a pitcher in the lineup — gets the opportunity to use a DH as the visiting team in an interleague series?
If you put a DH in an NL lineup, all of a sudden that lineup sucks (from a DFS perspective).
And what happens when an AL team is the visitor in an interleague series and must use pitchers as batters?
Amazing. The moment an AL pitcher steps into the batter’s box, all of his teammates somehow become DFS studs — all of them except for the benched DH, of course.
I think that this data is pretty unambiguous: Through their pricing, DFS platforms tend to overvalue the total fantasy impacts of DHs. It’s not that DHs don’t improve their MLB lineups and facilitate more fantasy scoring. It’s that DFS platforms make you pay a premium for that extra production.
DHs can be a source of fantasy debt — but the DFS platforms are sure to charge interest.
Leveraging This Information
Get it? “Leveraging”? GET IT?!
It’s almost a cliché in MLB DFS that, all else being equal, one should stack an AL (instead of an NL) lineup because of the DH.
As you might expect, that general practice is exploitable in tournaments, not only because far too many people probably do it blindly, but also because it’s based on assumptions that go against the evidence.
And if you see an NL team playing on the road against an AL team and you think, “Oh, sweet, a DH” — think again.
I believe that this information can be leveraged in a variety of ways to provide an edge — not a big edge, but because of the volatility of MLB DFS sometimes even a small edge can result in huge production.
And that’s a movie worth seeing.
#Monster
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The Labyrinthian: 2016, 46
Previous installments of The Labyrinthian can be accessed via my author page. If you have suggestions on material I should know about or even write about in a future Labyrinthian, please contact me via email, [email protected], or Twitter @MattFtheOracle.
