FanDuel Mixup contests have weekly changing themes and abbreviated rosters. This week’s theme is “The Great Outdoors” and has a roster of two pitchers and three utility batters:
This week, you can roster only players in games played in an outdoor park — no domes or retractable roofs.
Let’s talk pricing and strategy.
Pricing
In my inaugural Mixup strategy piece last week, I spent a bit of time breaking down how the five-player roster and pricing affects strategy and game theory. It seems as if FanDuel does not plan on changing that aspect of their Mixup contests: They again require two pitchers and three batters, and the salary cap is again $35,000.
In that article, I found that salaries in regular contests and Mixup contests have nearly perfect correlation:
Thus, one of my three main takeaways was that you can use our Player Models to research both pitchers and batters. If a player is mispriced in regular contests on FanDuel, he’ll be mispriced in Mixup contests. Here were the takeaways again:
- 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 be 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.
Because all that changes on a weekly basis in these contests is which players you can roster, I’m going to thus focus more on those restrictions and how they affect strategy instead of pricing and roster construction. Refer to the original article for my full thoughts on those two aspects.
Strategy for Outdoor Games
Given that you can roster players only from outdoor games, weather is the factor this week in Mixup contests. I’m stealing a table from Ian Hartitz’s MLB study on weather; here’s how precipitation percentage affects Plus/Minus values for hitters:
In comparison to pitchers, batters are much less susceptible to negative consequences of precipitation; if a game delays, the starting pitcher could get cold and be pulled, whereas batters mostly play the entire game no matter the weather. The value of batters can be negatively affected by a postponed game, but those are not common.
That’s good information to know, and it’s especially applicable in cash games, in which users must emphasize safety and opportunity. But in guaranteed prize pools (GPPs), users should be more focused on a combination of upside and ownership percentage. Weather can likely provide an edge in this regard.
Let’s look at an example: Here’s how FanDuel hitters batting first through fifth have performed with implied team totals between 4.5 and 5.5 runs (per the MLB Trends tool):
These batters have performed well, averaging 11.37 FanDuel points with a +1.42 Plus/Minus and 44.6 percent Consistency Rating. Additionally, these batters have hit their Upside mark 19 percent of the time and been owned in 10.7 percent of GPP lineups. If we look at these same batters but add a chance of precipitation, we find that the cohort actually scores more FanDuel points and has the same Upside mark with a reduced ownership rate of 9.5 percent:
If we look at batters with odds of precipitation between 61 and 80 percent, everything gets better, including the Upside mark at 20 percent:
We’ve probably found an exploitable bias. Most DFS users have the general heuristic that “rain = bad” because of how it affects pitchers, and thus they misunderstand weather’s affect on batters. Not only do batters have lower ownership with a high chance of precipitation — they also have superior historical production!
June 5: An Example
Our Player Models illuminate this point as well. Here are the projected leadoff hitters for each team on June 5, along with their Weather Ratings, precipitation percentages, and other weather data points:
Here’s the definition of our Weather Rating metric:
The percentile rank of a game’s Weather Rating, or how hitter-friendly we’ve deemed it to be; this is calculated using a model weighing specific weather factors and their impact on scoring
As you can see above, there’s zero negative correlation between a game’s chance of precipitation and its Weather Rating. In fact, of the three games with a slate-high Weather Rating of 70, two of them have precipitation odds between 64 and 68 percent. Ironically, the leadoff batters in games with high odds of rain are those with the weather that correlates best with fantasy production. That is a potentially massive edge in GPPs.
All that said, there are still situations in which poor weather negatively affects batters. Batters in cold games typically don’t do well (chart once again from Ian’s article):
Additionally, situations like the one we have today in Chicago — the wind is blowing in toward home plate — can negatively affect batters.
But the most important weather factor, or at least the most publicized factor — rain — does not hurt batters. In fact, it’s easier to find games with high Weather Ratings by looking at games with high odds of precipitation than those with low odds.
When creating lineups both in regular contests and Mixups this week, it’s still probably wise to roster pitchers likely to avoid rain. With batters, however, there’s potentially a big edge in rostering players likely to encounter rain. Arbitrage.
