This is a weekly series that follows MLB trends created with our Trends tool. Although the trends in this series are made with specific slates in mind, they are designed to remain relevant throughout the season.
5/30: The Chalk to Fade
On Tuesday, Chris Sale was the clear chalk option at pitcher. He had been dominant to start the 2017 season and was facing a White Sox lineup that has been an exploitable matchup for pitchers. There was even a solid ‘revenge game’ angle in play.
What many overlooked was that the White Sox are not actually bad against lefty pitching. In fact, there was a case to be made that Chicago was the absolute worst team for a lefty to face: Their collective .362 weighted on-base average (wOBA) against lefties coming into the contest was tops in the league, and their 17.2 strikeout percentage trailed only Kansas City’s mark. At the heart of the White Sox order, Jose Abreu and Todd Frazier are both guys DFS players have sought to roster against lefties in the past.
Feeling this matchup wasn’t what it was made out to be, I set up the simplest trend in the world for reassurance. Here is the collective performance of lefty pitchers who have faced the White Sox in 2017:
The average ownership within this cohort of 13.4 percent ranked inside the top 10 while the -3.70 Plus/Minus ranked in the bottom three. That’s the recipe for a fade. Sale, of course, is capable of putting up big numbers against any team in the league, but with a sky-high DraftKings price tag and through-the-roof ownership he was a strong fade candidate.
Results
At 45.57 average ownership (per our DFS Ownership Dashboard), Sale finished with just the eighth-highest pitching score on the slate:
Given the pregame expectations, that is a massive disappointment.
5/30: The Place to Pivot
The pitcher who finished with the top score on May 30 was arguably the one with the best overall matchup. As good as Robbie Ray has been in 2017, he has been even better when the Diamondbacks hit the road. Sometimes DFS players make too big of a deal of home/road splits, but when a pitcher calls one of the premier hitting parks his home I pay attention to dramatic splits. With that in mind, here are Ray’s home/away splits over his 65 starts with the Diamondbacks:
Further, not all road starts are the same. PNC Park boasts an 89 Park Factor for lefty pitching, the second-highest Park Factor on the slate. The opposing Pirates ranked in the middle of the pack on the year against lefty pitching, but with Starling Marte and Gregory Polanco out of the lineup the Pirates seemed unlikely to live up to even their mediocre ranking.
Results
I think we are sometimes so eager to fade the chalk that we come up with angles that probably don’t hold a whole lot of weight when placed in the proper context. That’s not what happened here: We had a chalk option in a difficult matchup paired with a pivot whose matchup checked all the boxes. Ray was not unpopular at 17.8 percent ownership, but he was rostered significantly less than Sale.
5/11: The Bad Kind of Velocity Loss
Last spring, I completed a study on fastball velocity changes. While the general trend shows that pitchers who lose velocity perform worse, that is not always the case. For example, if a pitcher’s velocity is down but his average distance allowed is also down, the results are much better, perhaps suggesting that the pitcher has intentionally changed his approach and not that pitcher has a potential injury, which is what we’re most afraid of when a pitcher’s speed is down.
Enter Ian Kennedy on 5/31. Not only was Kennedy’s recent velocity down by more than two miles per hour, but his average distance allowed had increased by 15 feet and his exit velocity allowed had increased by three miles per hour. Pitchers with similar Statcast differentials have posted these disastrous results:
In a pitcher’s park, playing as a slight Vegas favorite against the righty-heavy Detroit Tigers, Kennedy had a pregame ownership projection of nine to 12 percent per our Player Models. I thought that was a little high, but propelled by a low $6,600 DraftKings salary Kennedy did indeed have a 9.1 percent average ownership rate in DraftKings guaranteed prize pools, including a surprising 17.86 percent in the high-stakes Thunderdome.
Results
Unfortunately for Kennedy, his poor under-the-hood stats caught up to him in a big way. The Tigers tagged him for five earned runs over three innings and Kennedy just barely stayed in the positives, totaling 0.55 fantasy points.
As an aside, I want to mention that at FantasyLabs we tend to focus on recent Statcast data, but from a hitter’s perspective we still might underutilized recent performance of the opposing pitcher.
I looked at Kennedy’s recent performance and identified him as a fade candidate, but I could have easily taken that one step further and played some Detroit batters, many of whom were available at low ownership.
Should you wish to pay more attention to the opposing pitcher’s recent Statcast data, you can increase the weight given to ‘Opp Dist Allowed % – 15’ within your own Models.
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Thanks for following along with my three custom trends this week. As always, there’s plenty more left to be explored via the Labs Tools.
