I’ve recently been seeing people ask an interesting question: When a top batter faces a top pitcher, who wins? It’s the old what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object debate, fantasy-style. I’ve seen a variety of answers, and thankfully our Trends tool can quickly provide some data on the subject.
To do this, I set up the following parameters for our Trends tool:
This should capture the best hitters (priced $5k and above), going against the best pitchers (top strikeout percentile plus killer WHIP). I thought it was important to include both parameters for the pitchers – it really gives us the best versus the best, as some guys have high Ks but also give up a bunch of walks and hits, and vice versa. Anyway, here were the results:
In the past two seasons, there have been 80 instances where we got a top hitter versus a top pitcher, according to our parameters, and the results are interesting. Before I saw the results, I would have given the edge to the pitchers, but the data shows that the hitters have been winning the battle. They are +1.46 over expected value (calculated by salary) when facing these pitchers.
This is even more impressive considering how daily of a game MLB DFS is – in a sport like football where the games are spread out across the span of a week, sites can update player salaries according to matchups. In baseball, games are so frequent that salaries won’t dramatically rise and fall on a day-to-day basis. As a result, these hitters are still outperforming their expected production even without the drop in salary they “should” get because of the bad matchup.
Further, this is important because you can probably get these batters at an ownership discount – that is, they will probably be less owned than normal because of their perceived bad matchup. I’m not necessarily advocating seeking these players out on a daily basis, but they could be a great contrarian play. Anytime you can get a Bryce Harper or Mike Trout with low ownership, that’s huge in a tournament.
