Who doesn’t just love a bargain? “Half off all Halloween candy on November 1st”? Yes. “Buy 9 pizzas, 10th one free”? Clearly. “Click here to win a free Apple iPad”? Ehh. So we need to find the right kinds of bargains, ones that actually benefit us.
Players go on sale all the time in DraftKings and FanDuel for all different reasons. Someone whose price has dropped, but is playing through an injury or who has recently been moved down in the batting order may represent a bad deal, but there is also exploitable value out there. Let’s play around with a custom trend and see what we get.
The first parameter returns players whose salary has dropped by $300 or more in FanDuel over the past month and the second parameter requires a 50 or higher in consistency rating. My thinking here is that the most consistent players will still have ups and downs, but will likely be quick to rebound. If I can catch someone like this while their price is down, it could be a valuable play.
Not a huge sample size, but I think we can still work with it. Let’s get more specific. Here are the current matches on this particular day:
Starling Marte had reached his all-time high price a few weeks prior and his salary has been slowly coming down since then. A player who is just “back to value after being at an all-time high price” isn’t necessarily a good play, but Marte in particular is in the midst of the best statistical start to a season of his career, has settled in as the cleanup hitter for Pittsburgh within the past 2-3 weeks after spending the start of the season at 5 or 6 in the order, and has even been relatively hot lately, as his FanDuel game log shows below.
Freddie Freeman is a pretty well-known splits player, with both his wOBA and ISO numbers an even 50 points higher against righties over the course of his career. As we know, a lot of players with large splits don’t make it into the lineup every day for their team. Those with noticeable splits who ARE in the lineup every day can encounter a string of pitchers on the wrong side of their split which may make it appear they are slumping when really it’s been a series of bad matchups consecutively. Freeman actually has faced a few righties recently at the time of this writing, but still something to watch out for.
A-Rod has recently been relegated to pinch-hitting duties while the Yankees are playing in an NL-park. He’s responded with a couple 0-for-1 days, which is starting to tank his price on FanDuel. He is fully expected to resume his duties as Yankees’ DH once they wrap up their series with the Nationals and will likely do so with a few hundred dollars knocked off his FD salary.
So we’ve taken a look at three different players who fit the specified criteria and considered three different explanations for how these types of players become mis-priced. I think the above players currently represent the good kind of bargain (the pizza kind) from a pricing perspective, based on their high consistency ratings and reasonable salaries. Try setting up your own custom price trends and see if you can explain why the players you see have recently gone down or up in price.
