How Much Does Run Support Matter for Pitchers in MLB DFS?

I’ve preached this a lot recently, but only because it’s so important – know how sites score fantasy points. The way that pitchers accumulate fantasy points on DraftKings and FanDuel are very different (in terms of the weight of each category), and that matters a whole lot when selecting pitchers every day. Sure, Clayton Kershaw is probably a good play every time on every site, but for some pitchers, they can be a very good value on one site, and not so great on the other.

On FanDuel, wins are very important. As a result, I thought run support might also be quite important. However, on DraftKings, it may not mean as much – you want elite strikeout guys. If your guy is primed to get double-digit K’s, you might not really care less about what his team does on the offensive side of things. On FanDuel, you very much do. Right?

Thankfully, our Trends tool can show us this in approximately 0.2 seconds. Here’s a graph of pitchers’ historical Plus/Minus on DraftKings with run support between 2.8 and 5.2 runs.

And now, here’s the same data for pitchers on FanDuel.

This confirms our hypothesis that run support matters more on FanDuel – the data shows that pitchers generally have a negative Plus/Minus when their team’s offense is only projected at four runs or less. Above that line, you see that it’s a pretty steady positive line, outside of the higher numbers being skewed by sample size issues.

On DraftKings, we see that pitchers only really dip into negative Plus/Minus below 3.4 runs projected for their team’s offense. This is a good reminder that while wins are definitely valued less on DraftKings, they’re still valued. I think that if I were choosing between two pitchers on DraftKings with equal strikeout upside, I would probably use this as a deciding factor, taking the pitcher with a higher probability of winning thanks to better run support.

This topic gets even more interesting when talking about stacking, and especially on FanDuel. DraftKings’ stacking rules are that hitters have to span three separate teams – pitchers aren’t included into stacking rules at all. However, on FanDuel, you can only take four players from a single team, be it batters or pitcher. You can see the problem – a team you’d potentially want to target with a stack on FanDuel means you either can’t take that pitcher, or you can only take three of their top four guys in the batting order.

This certainly makes things more challenging, but as Jonathan Bales theorized today, perhaps stacking is becoming less useful as a strategy. On FanDuel certainly, it’s impossible to stack a great offense if you want to take their pitcher that day as well. So then the question becomes – does run support and getting your top pitcher in matter more than fitting in the top four guys of that stack? It’s certainly an interesting dilemma.