One thing that makes daily fantasy baseball and basketball different than football, golf, or other sports is that players play much more often. As a result, sites can’t change a player’s salary as drastically as football, for example, which has a whole week in between games. We know that matchups are important in DFS, so if a player’s salary doesn’t change although they’re still affected by matchups, we’ll see some discrepancy in value – sites just don’t have the time to price in matchups as much as they should.
We see this in baseball with batter splits versus pitcher handedness – if a player has a large wOBA difference between right and left-handed pitchers, you’re likely going to be underpaying when they have a good matchup and overpaying if not. This is why you want to focus on handedness so much – you want to underpay as much as possible to maximize your lineup.
I was wondering prior to this article if all batters were affected by this equally or not. Specifically, are the top batters ($5,000 or more on DraftKings, we’ll say) majorly affected by their splits? This may sound dumb at first – I mean, of course batters with a higher wOBA against lefties would also score more fantasy points against lefties. But the question I’m looking at is: do the top batters score less in bad matchups enough to hurt their value in terms of Plus/Minus?
We can find this instantaneously using our Trends tool, so here we go:
As you can see, top batters with a negative wOBA split are still outperforming their expected production based on salary (Plus/Minus). What this really shows us is that the top batters are still underpriced, even with their very high salary. Mike Trout will pretty much always cost you over $5,000, but that doesn’t mean you should fade him against lefties, which he has a lower wOBA against compared to righties (.357 versus .408).
In fact, this could be a really great contrarian strategy – obviously if you’re going to wrap up such a large portion of your salary cap in a player, you really need him to perform. DFS players might be hesitant to do that with a player with negative splits or in a bad matchup. However, while these top batters typically score fewer fantasy points against pitchers of which they have negative splits against, they still are a positive value.
I know this is pretty broken record-ish of me if you’ve read my recent articles, but ownership is so important in DFS now, especially in tournaments and now that the average DFS player is getting smarter. The goal to winning tournaments is to find value that the public isn’t on – top players with negative splits are likely to be much lower-owned than they would on a normal day.
If you can get the upside and value (again, the data says they’re values no matter what) of a Trout, Jose Bautista, or Miguel Cabrera with low ownership, you’re putting yourself in a very good position. Take Bautista for a quick example – everyone stacks the Jays against lefties, and for good reason. And while Bautista is a ridiculous value against lefties (+3.05), he’s still a positive value against righties (+0.69). Taking Bautista – or Trout, Miggy, or other great batter – against a righty will drop his ownership percentage by a ton, but still give you positive value.
In general, you’re still underpaying and overpaying for batters based on their splits, but the data shows that it’s really hard to actually overpay for the top batters. They’re pretty much always valuable.
