Long road trips are a common occurrence in the life of a baseball player. Teams often play two and even three consecutive series on the road before heading home, where they then might play for two or three series.
You don’t have to play baseball to know that extended road trips can be draining. Does hitter or pitcher performance suffer during extended road trips? And do long stays at home tend to lead to value? Let’s find out.
Hitters: Home Stands
Using our Trends tool, we can determine how hitters have performed in extended trips at home. As most baseball series are at least three games, the below streaks are broken into three-game increments:
Note that the overwhelming majority of home streaks have consisted of fewer than seven games. Still, we see that hitters have generally played better the longer they’ve been at home. The increase in Plus/Minus and Consistency Rating isn’t huge, but across a sample of this size it is significant.
Intriguingly, ownership doesn’t seem to be heavily impacted by duration at home. Ownership for hitters on DraftKings has been at its lowest in 10-game home streaks, but on FanDuel ownership is at its highest during that time. Either way, the ownership isn’t exorbitant. Reminder: you can view ownership data for each slate with our DFS Ownership Dashboard.
Hitters: Road Trips
Hitter production on the road isn’t quite as cleanly stratified as it is at home, but we still see the outline of a trend:
The ownership trends are a little bizarre, but in general (with the exception of two-series road trips) the longer teams have been on the road the worse they have done. While the home/away trends for hitters might not be especially actionable for shorter home stands and road trips, they likely provide an edge when we look at streaks of at least three series in length.
Pitchers: Home Stands
Historically, pitchers have played better the longer they’ve been at home:
For pitchers, there’s a positive correlation between duration at home and production, Plus/Minus, and Consistency. Again, ownership is more ambiguous on DraftKings.
This trend appears to be especially strong with pitchers who have thrived at home. Last season, pitchers who posted at least a +5.0 Plus/Minus at home averaged 37.17 FanDuel points per game with a +7.78 Plus/Minus and 70.2 percent Consistency during home streaks of at least seven days. Pitchers who have enjoyed being at home have really enjoyed it when the stay has been extended.
Pitchers: Road Trips
The data for pitchers on road trips isn’t clean:
Within this data are two general trends:
- Before a road streak of 10-plus days, the longer a road streak is the worse the production tends to be.
- Once a road streak has hit 10 days, pitcher production actually improves. Of course, this is based on a sample of 188 games, so it’s hard to put too much stock in it.
Basically, all we can say for sure is that, regardless of duration, it’s not advantageous to be on the road, where pitchers have underperformed their salary-based totals during streaks of any length.
Conclusion
We’ve established several key takeaways in this study:
- Although hitter production isn’t drastically impacted by duration of a home stand or road trip, there is still correlation between time and production. Particularly long home or away streaks have resulted in the most severe swings in value.
- Pitchers have done better the longer they’ve been at home, especially pitchers who normally thrive at home.
- Pitchers tend not to be good anyway on the road — but road streaks of 10-plus days have actually correlated with an improvement in pitcher production.
Within our Player Models we provide game logs that indicate how long a team has been at home or on the road. When you’re constructing rosters with our Lineup Builder, consider taking an extra look at players on longer home or away streaks. Of course, this is just one piece of the ever-evolving DFS puzzle. Be sure to do your own home/away research with the FantasyLabs Tools!
