This is the first installment of a weekly series that follows MLB trends created with our Trends tool. Although the trends in this series are made with specific slates in mind, they are designed to remain relevant throughout the course of the season.
4/10 – Jacob deGrom: Fantasy Vampire
As far as MLB narratives go, one of my favorites is Jacob deGrom’s performance in day vs. night games. Coming into Monday’s contest, that distinction was important to deGrom’s DraftKings Plus/Minus, with a +6.60 in day games and a +0.59 in night games. (A game starting at 7:00 p.m. ET or later I consider a night game.) With deGrom seemingly underpriced on DraftKings at $9,300 ahead of a matchup against the Phillies, he was expected to represent the chalk, and that turned out to be true. He was owned at 62.5 percent in the $1,500 Gold Glove guaranteed prize pool, which gave him a GPP Grade of 2.86 (via our DFS Ownership Dashboard), the slate’s highest mark among pitchers.
What’s intriguing is that a lot of sharp players chose to ignore deGrom’s clear day/night splits. Perhaps that was warranted, given deGrom’s relatively small sample of games, the positive matchup against the Phillies, and deGrom’s reasonable salary. Although rostering deGrom did not work out — he scored only 10.7 points — this is a great reminder that some of the best DFS players do not look at any single split in a vacuum. Playing at night has historically been negative for deGrom, but there were enough positive aspects in this matchup to make him rosterable.
If you’re on the fence about deGrom based on his price and overall matchup, is it fine to use his day/night splits as a tiebreaker? Sure. But keep this in mind: Even after his disappointing Monday performance, his overall Plus/Minus in night games is +0.46, making him far from an automatic fade.
4/11/17 – Batted Ball Luck & Giancarlo Stanton
One of my favorite additions to our 2017 MLB Product is the Recent Batted Ball Luck filter. “Rec BBL” (as it appears in the Player Models) presents the difference between a player’s percentile rank in batted ball distance and in fantasy points scored. A high score signifies a player who is hitting the ball far but scoring relatively few fantasy points.
I’ve created a trend that identifies any unlucky player whose Recent Batted Ball Luck exceeds +50, and on Tuesday one match who caught my eye was Giancarlo Stanton with a +52 Rec BBL. Stanton had scored only 26 fantasy points through the first five games of the season despite averaging a batted ball distance of 220 feet, which is not outstanding but is good enough to rank 20th or so in the slate. He was batting cleanup against Bartolo Colon, and I was hoping to buy low:
As it turned out, Stanton scored only two points while commanding higher ownership in lower-stake contests. Granted, there were plenty of bats in play on Tuesday, but Stanton’s ownership against Colon was surprising, especially since he was making solid contact entering the game. Statcast stuff in general, especially Recent Batted Ball Luck, is still underutilized in DFS decision-making.
Our Trends tool tells us that we can find good production at low ownership by continually targeting batters who have been unlucky when it comes to Recent Batted Ball Luck:
Before moving on, I’d like to note the leading scorer on Wednesday’s slate turned out to be Stanton, who remained a match for the Batted Ball Luck trend. I featured him one day early.
4/12 – Looking for Leverage
On Wednesday, I was looking for a pitching alternative to Marcus Stroman, who seemed likely to represent the chalk in a matchup against the Brewers, a team people love to target. I knew I wanted a few attributes in a pitcher:
• Someone unlikely to dud
• Someone whose team was favored
• Someone not overpriced
Translating that into a trend, I set “Season Duds” to “0 to 10,” “Favorite/Dog” to “Favorite,” and “Season Salary Change” to “-$2,000 to +$500”:
The match who stuck out the most was John Lackey. Although Lackey sometimes seems inconsistent, his dud rate over the past season has been only 10 percent. Backed by the powerful Cubs lineup, he was a Vegas favorite who seemed likely to win a matchup against the Dodgers (assuming he could limit the damage). Finally, his price was reasonable at $9,900 on DraftKings.
As expected, Stroman had the slate’s highest average ownership at 60.05 percent. Meanwhile, Lackey came in at 16.44 percent ownership, but he had a negative ownership differential between high- and low-stakes tournaments, which was concerning.
Lackey spun six innings of one-run ball, striking out 10, but unfortunately he was not rewarded with a win thanks to some great pitching on the other side by Brandon McCarthy and the Dodgers bullpen. Lackey did outscore Stroman by around 5.5 fantasy points, but he also cost $600 more than Stroman ($9,300).
Conclusion
Baseball is unique. Each ballpark has different dimensions, players perform markedly better or worse depending on the handedness and batted ball tendencies of their opponents, and the event-based nature of the game leads to huge scoring swings. These factors make our Trends tool incredibly valuable, as it helps us identify and leverage this uniqueness. In the three trends above, we looked at day/night splits, batted ball regression, and Vegas and site pricing data, and we noted significant Plus/Minus splits each step of the way.
