It’s common for daily fantasy baseball players to use Vegas data in their decision-making, even if it’s just to help them determine who the chalky players will be. Check out our DFS Ownership Dashboard, and you’ll see the extent to which Vegas implications correlate with ownership in guaranteed prize pools.
Last week, I looked at how Vegas data impacts hitters. This time we’ll utilize the Trends tool to see what a positive Vegas outlook can mean for a pitcher. It’s important to remember that Vegas Score is a team-specific (not game specific) metric. Also, the Vegas Score for a pitcher is not the same as the Vegas Score for the pitcher’s offense. The metric takes into account all of the Vegas-based factors (run total, moneyline, line movement, etc.).
Uber Vegas Score
I’m designating a Vegas Score of 90 and above as “Uber Vegas.” Right away we can see that an Uber Vegas Score is good for a pitcher’s FanDuel performance:
The ownership is high, but that’s what we should expect since so many people look to the same data to help craft their rosters.
Uber Vegas and the Heavy Favorites
When we look Uber Vegas Scores and heavy favorites with moneyline odds of -200 or above, the ownership surprisingly doesn’t spike all that much — moving from 20.7 percent to 23.2 percent — but the Plus/Minus jumps up more than two full points to +6.82 and the Consistency Rating rises by six percentage points.
Uber Vegas and Line Movement
For hitters in Uber Vegas situations, line movement had an effect only when the movement was unusually large, and the same goes for pitchers. Setting the line slider to “-1.9 to -0.3” gives us a Plus/Minus of +5.07, but the sample shrunk and the Consistency didn’t even increase.
Uber Vegas Pitchers and the Total
I put the game totals into buckets to show which are most favorable for pitchers. Once again, the highest Plus/Minus values are found at the rare extremes:
The bulk of the value is in the 6.5-7.5 range, where 83.4 percent of the Uber Vegas situations occur.
Uber Vegas and Salary
When we put Uber Vegas pitchers into salary buckets, we (again) see that the best value is at the extremes:
We also see that pricing is much tighter on DraftKings than FanDuel.
Uber Vegas Home vs. Road
As expected, Uber Vegas pitchers are better at home, but not by much, with a +4.69 FanDuel Plus/Minus vs. a +4.38 on the road. Home pitchers also are more consistent (61 percent to 59), reach their Upside Rating more often (3 percent to 2) and have nearly identical ownership (20.8 percent to 20.5).
Conclusion
You could do worse than just blindly locking pitchers with Uber Vegas Scores into your rosters when using our Lineup Builder. If you targets these pitchers with a little more discretion, you can have even better results.
Pro subscribers should be sure to experiment with our Vegas Score metric when constructing their own Player Models. For pitchers, most FantasyLabs Pro Models give Vegas the second-heaviest weighting of all the factors, right after Strikeout Prediction Percentage.
