FanDuel Mixup contests have weekly changing themes and abbreviated rosters. This week’s theme is “Warning Track Heroes” and has a roster of two pitchers and three utility batters.
As you might have surmised given the theme title, only outfielders are eligible to be utility batters this week.
Let’s talk pricing and strategy.
Pricing
In the table below, I’ve included salaries for players in Monday’s slate for both regular and Mixup contests:
The most notable aspect of pricing is that the two contests have almost perfect correlation:
A high correlation isn’t bad; in fact, we can use it to find edges, as I’ve done with my Vegas Bargain Rating metric in daily fantasy golf, which I created by correlating odds to win and DraftKings salary. Essentially, I found a line of best fit, retrodicted salaries, and then spotted the biggest discrepancies. Unfortunately, that sort of analysis doesn’t work with FanDuel Mixup because salaries are too correlated. In golf, the two variables have an r-squared of about 0.80 in any given week; here, the r-squared is 0.99 for pitchers and 0.97 for batters — a near perfect 1.0 correlation. We could still use a line of best fit to retrodict salaries and spot differences (and then put those differences on a 0-to-100 scale) . . .
. . . but those differences aren’t major. Daniel Norris, for example, is the most ‘underpriced’ pitcher on Mixup relative to his regular salary, but he’s underpriced by only $118. That’s a rounding error, not an edge.
Perhaps it’s more useful to take a player’s salary as a percentage of the salary cap — it’s $35,000 in both contest formats — and then find the biggest differences. Here’s that data:
This is a little more useful — it shows that it’s perhaps harder to roster high-priced pitchers in Mixup contests — but it’s still a small edge. Carlos Carrasco has the largest salary cap differential, but it’s slight at only -6.00 percentage points. The smallest differential, belonging to Daniel Mengden, is just -3.43 percentage points.
I’ve compiled all of this data to tell you something probably unhelpful: Analyzing regular salaries doesn’t provide us a big edge in Mixup contests. If a player is mispriced in regular contests, he’s mispriced in Mixup games.
Strategy
Really, the biggest differences between Mixup and regular contests have to do with roster specifications. In regular contests, a pitcher is 1/9 of the players you must select with your $35,000 cap; in Mixup contests, pitchers require 2/5 of the roster spots. Of course, that doesn’t mean that pitchers are 28.9 percentage points (2/5 minus 1/9) more important in Mixups than in regular games.
Here are the average salaries today for pitchers and batters in both slates:
- Mixup: $8,750 pitchers; $3,810 batters
- Regular: $7,245 pitchers; $2894 pitchers
Now let’s allocate average salaries for pitchers in both contests.
- Mixup: $8,750 x 2 = $17,500 (50.0 percent of salary cap)
- Regular: $7,245 x 1 = $7,245 (20.7 percent of salary cap)
These percentages allow an average of $5,833 per batter in Mixup contests and $3,469 per batter in regular contests. Here are the cap breakdowns of that:
- Mixup: $5,833 / $35,000 = 16.7 percent of salary cap per batter
- Regular: $3,469 / $35,000 = 9.9 percent of salary cap per batter
But what if you rostered the two highest-priced pitchers on Mixup and the most expensive pitcher in regular contests? That would allow an average of $3,767 per batter in Mixup contests and $3,088 in regular contests:
- Mixup: $3,767 / $35,000 = 10.8 percent of salary cap per batter
- Regular: $3,088 / $35,000 = 8.8 percent of salary cap per batter
The difference is less stated in this scenario, but it’s still there.
Of course, even if in Mixups it seems harder to roster high-end pitchers and still fit in the batters you want, that’s not the case. If FanDuel had raised pitcher pricing or added a fourth utility spot, roster construction would be more difficulut, but as it stands now pricing is soft for Mixup slates. You can largely roster the players you want.
So if there’s an edge in Mixups it might come via ownership. In regular FanDuel contests, each pitcher’s ownership is depressed because only one per team is rostered. The difference between regular FanDuel contests and Mixups isn’t unlike the different between FanDuel and DraftKings, where two pitchers per lineup are rostered.
In last Thursday’s slate, guys like Robbie Ray and Drew Pomeranz were had higher ownership on DraftKings than FanDuel (per our DFS Ownership Dashboard), because of the second roster spot for pitchers:
On FanDuel, ownership levels were lower across the board:
Because Mixup rosters force you to roster two pitchers, the chalk — which will likely be Kyle Hendricks today (Monday), who is on the road in a pitcher’s park against an anemic Padres offense — will probably be even chalkier. Thus in Mixups being contrarian with pitchers will have more value than it typically does on FanDuel.
For batters, since there are only three spots for many options, and since pricing is relatively soft, ownership will probably be fairly distributed. You can be contrarian without giving up a ton of expected value.
To recap . . .
- Although you have to roster two pitchers in Mixup contests, pricing is still soft because there are only five players in a single lineup.
- The edge in contests will probably via ownership.
- Because of the near perfect correlation between salaries, you can use Player Models for the all-day slate to analyze players this week.
Good luck!
