During most of the NBA season this year, I wrote a weekly series called “NBA Trend Testing,” in which I would use the FantasyLabs Trends tool to create a custom trend and then track the results of my matches for the week. The goal is to create trends with high Plus/Minus values and share them with our readers. I will be doing the same thing during MLB season and will be posting an article every Friday which will review the past week’s custom trend.
In this week’s article, I wanted to try to use wOBA splits along with Salary Change to create a trend to be used for FanDuel cash games in MLB DFS. I generally create Trends for FanDuel anyway, but with this Trend in particular, I think it is important that we are looking at FanDuel.
I feel as though DraftKings’ pricing is much more fluid and subject to change based on player matchups than FanDuel’s is. What this means is that while DraftKings may lower a player’s price based on a tough pitcher matchup, a FanDuel price, for the most part, will be lowered when a player is performing poorly.
A player could be performing poorly for a number of reasons though, including their schedule – they may have just had several consecutive poor matchups on the schedule. Alternatively, their surface level stats may be poor, while our advanced stats tell a different story. Whatever the case, we’re going to target hitters whose price is down over the last month that are in positive matchups on a given day.
Description
The two filters that I used to create this Trend were:
• The Month Salary Change is between -$1500 and -$300
• The wOBA Split Percentile is between 90 and 99.
Historically, batters have added 0.67 fantasy points per game.
Results
Screenshots were taken from $5 GPP teams I entered throughout the week on FanDuel.
4/25
Lind is a perfect example of the type of player we are looking for with this trend. Looking at his splits over the Fantasy Year, Lind has added .130 points to his wOBA and .120 points to ISO when facing a right-handed pitcher.
Additionally, his price on FanDuel was down -$400 over the past month, which means that even though Lind was in a situation that we know has historically yielded positive results, he was on sale. Unfortunately, it didn’t pan out here, although Lind did homer in his next game against Collin McHugh under the same circumstances.
4/26
On Tuesday, we ran into a perfect storm of sorts. Stanton had started off the year slowly leading into 4/26, though he had shown some recent signs of positive regression and Miami was in Los Angeles to oppose Clayton Kershaw that night. Stanton’s ownership was, understandably, minimal despite the platoon advantage. If anything, this is a reminder that you can still roster the league’s top hitters even in difficult matchups in GPPs. When Stanton is hot like this, not even Kershaw can keep him in the park.
4/27
Just in case you thought I was lying, here is the aforemention Lind homer (at one percent ownership). There is just so much talent at first base right now that you can relatively easily find players who have massive splits in plus matchups at low ownership at this position on a nightly basis.
4/28
There’s no disputing Justin Upton’s start to the 2016 season has been poor, to say the least. However, our advanced stats showed he has still been hitting the ball over 215 feet on average over the past two weeks and has increased his exit velocity by 2 mph. Hitting near the heart of the Tigers’ order and facing a righty (+.100 wOBA, +.100 ISO vs righties over the past calendar year), I had no problem rostering Upton at Jackie Bradley Jr. prices in this GPP. On a day with only seven games (excluding the rainout) in the full slate, Upton still only appeared on five percent of rosters.
Review
Originally constructed as a cash-game trend, I think there is some sneaky usefulness for tournaments as well. We saw this trend identify one cheap superstar on the right side of his handedness split but in a tough matchup come through at minimal ownership when we rostered Stanton vs. Kershaw. Similarly, we enjoyed bargain-bin pricing on a player with a massive lefty-righty split whose ownership level was deflated due to all of the other strong plays at his position (Adam Lind).
