At FantasyLabs, we believe that we have the best tools and data available to those who play daily fantasy sports. We also realize that these tools and data are only as beneficial as our ability to communicate their functionality and worth.
With this in mind, our Trend of the Day series features articles that walk subscribers through an important trend each weekday, created with our Trends tool. Also, shortly after you create a trend, you will be able to see it under the “My Trends” column in our Player Model tools.
And you know what else? Because this TOTD is so awesome, it’s also going to double as a special edition of The Labyrinthian. But who am I kidding? Every edition of The Labyrinthian is “special.”
This is the 49th 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.
MLB Trend of the Day: The Offensive Impact of the Pinch Hitter
In yesterday’s Labyrinthian, I highlighted some trends indicating that DFS platforms might undervalue the subtle impact that pinch hitters have on their offenses and fellow batters in National League games.
The logic that leads to this insight goes something like this (per yesterday’s piece):
In the American League, when a pitcher is bad, he is merely replaced by another pitcher. In general, regardless of however many runs an AL pitcher is expected to give up, we would expect to see his batters have fairly consistent production. And that’s what we see. . .
But what if an NL pitcher is bad? He’s not merely replaced by another pitcher. He’s usually replaced in the lineup by a pinch hitter through a double switch. So if an NL pitcher is bad and removed from the game, we should see the impact of the pinch hitter. And the worse an NL pitcher is — the sooner he is removed from the game — the greater the impact of the pinch hitter should theoretically be.
And the trends that I presented yesterday bear this out. We know that the NL uses more pinch hitters. When pitchers are expected by Vegas to do poorly and they are pulled from games early, pinch hitters enter the games earlier and thus improve the potential for their offenses and teammates to score more runs and receive more opportunities.
Let’s build on yesterday’s work.
Step 1: Team Filters > Division > “National League Central, East, and West”
Step 2A: Vegas Filters > Opp Runs > “0 to 3.9”
Meh. This is basically a baseline by which we can judge the following versions of the trend.
Step 2B: Vegas Filters > Opp Runs > “4 to 6.6”
That’s better.
Step 2C: Vegas Filters > Opp Runs > “4.4 to 6.6”
That’s even better.
Step 2D: Vegas Filters > Opp Runs > “4.4 to 6.6”
And that’s even better still.
I Hope That You Appreciate the Implications of This Genius Trend
When people look to create stacks for tournament lineups, what’s the first thing that most of them do? They try to find the pitchers whom Vegas projects, in the words of someone from Texas, “are gonna be in for a good ol’-fashion shellackin’.”
That part of the process is fine. It’s standard.
The problem is that most DFS players will then stack against those pitchers. Doing that makes sense from a traditional perspective, but in tournaments it is often a suboptimal move, because those stacks are likely to be rostered in a high percentage of lineups.
So, some people, in an attempt to be contrarian, move away from these pitchers entirely. They seek not to benefit from what will likely be some exploitable pitching performances. In terms of game theory, this move might make more sense than stacking against the pitchers, but it’s also likely to be suboptimal, since one will be intentionally avoiding the pitching situations likely to result in lots of fantasy points for batters.
I think that the solution to this seeming catch-22 is pretty clear.
Stack On (Not Against) Pitchers
If you want to leverage exploitable pitching performances in a contrarian way, don’t stack the batters who will be facing those pitchers. Instead, stack the batters on their own teams.
We have seen that the worse an NL pitcher is expected to do, the better his batters tend to do, according to our Plus/Minus metric. The pitcher gets knocked out of the game early, and his batters benefit from the “unexpected” Gray Swan-esque presence of (non-pitcher) pinch hitters in the lineup for the rest of the game.
As long as a team isn’t expected to score an atrocious number of runs, this strategy could be viable.
Step 3: Vegas Filters > Runs > “3.8 to 6.6”
In doing nothing except utilizing exploitable pitchers in a very contrarian way with lineups that are at least decent, we’ve created a respectable trend.
If you played around with it more, you could definitely get the Plus/Minus higher.
Current Matches
As I write this, the Brewers, Reds, Diamondbacks, and Rockies match for this trend. The last two teams will likely be the quintessence of chalk in today’s slate. Even the Reds could be rostered in a lot of lineups. The Brewers, however, are likely to be stacked in very few lineups. They aren’t likely to be outlandishly productive, but they probably have better-than-expected potential to provide value.
The Takeaway
Whether you realize it or not, you’re always in a labyrinth. And when you’re not sure about where you’re going, sometimes it makes sense to turn around and start walking in the other direction.
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The Labyrinthian: 2016, 49
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.
