When Yahoo! announced their daily fantasy offerings last year starting with MLB, I initially wrote an article about their pricing quirks as compared to some of the bigger sites like DraftKings or FanDuel. That first article was about their pitchers and I meant to get to a hitters one last summer but never did. So better late than never – let’s go through it now.
In the past article, I looked at a specific slate – July 28th, 2015, to be exact – and compared the salaries of the starting pitchers across the three sites: DraftKings, FanDuel, and Yahoo. I did this because since Yahoo was brand new, there were no historical trends to compare like on DK and FD. Doing it this way with pitchers wasn’t that tough – even though it was a large 15-game slate, we only had 30 pitchers to evaluate. Hitters … well, there’s a bit more of them.
In order to look at this but not get completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of them on a 15-game slate – 30 teams times nine players a piece is 270 hitters to evaluate, at minimum – I looked at the top hitters of the night ($4,000 and above on DraftKings) and then the top-20 rated players (by the Bales Model) under $4k.
Before I throw out the spreadsheets, I do think it’s important to note the difference between the highest-salaried player on the site and the minimum-priced batters. Here’s how the three sites stacked up on that particular night…
DraftKings – Difference: $3,800, Percentage of Salary Cap: 7.60%
FanDuel – Difference: $2,500, Percentage of Salary Cap: 7.14%
Yahoo – Difference: $14, Percentage of Salary Cap: 7.00%
I mentioned in the pitcher’s article that the salaries set up to really accentuate the elite players – because everyone is closer in price (relative to the cap), there’s less reason to not pay up for the top elite talent. Or to put it more simply: there’s less value, if you define value as upside versus salary or whatever. If the salaries are similar, you’re going to take Mike Trout over a middle-of-the-road hitter.
Alright, now let’s look at the specific players. Here are the hitters $4.5k and up on DraftKings and their respective salaries on the other two sites (and the percentage of the total salary cap):
Hitters between that and $4k:
And finally hitters under $4k:
This is a bit interesting – their values match up with FanDuel, while their percentages actually match up well with DraftKings. Unfortunately, as noted in the pitcher article from last year, this doesn’t really help us that much because 1) they require two pitchers like DK, and 2) their quirky pitching pricing algorithm really emphasizes the top pitchers or completely punting the position altogether (not advisable).
What I’m saying is this – their batting pricing isn’t quirky like their pitching; unfortunately, it has to be in order to make up for the pitching. Basically, they either both have to be off from DK and FD or both be together; having just one off really skews the marketplace set forth in the daily Yahoo contests.
So what can you do? Well, as seen above there are some really odd values – Kris Bryant and Delino DeShields for example from this slate. You’re going to have to find these on a daily basis if you want to roster the top pitchers, which – as stated before – is almost forced upon you because of the pricing. Of course, this could change in the upcoming season, but until then, try your best to take a balanced approach to hitting while dealing with the quirkiness of the pitching pricing.
