In my past couple of Labyrinthians, I looked at FanDuel batters and DraftKings batters and, using our free Trends tool, I’ve identified what I am terming ‘salary sweet spots’ — tiers within the pricing spectrum that historically have returned positive Plus/Minus values and/or enhanced Consistency. Although I concluded those pieces with some general guidelines, more direction regarding how to apply and think about these salary sweet spots is probably warranted.
This is the 64th installment of The Labyrinthian, a series dedicated to exploring random fields of knowledge in order to give you unordinary theoretical, philosophical, strategic, and/or often rambling guidance on daily fantasy sports. Consult the introductory piece to the series for further explanation.
There’s an Email Address at the Bottom of This Article
Sometimes people reach out to me via Twitter or email and ask me questions regarding pieces I’ve written. Today, I got an email from a reader whose first name is “Matt” and last name will remain anonymous because I am he I haven’t gotten his permission to use his full name.
Here’s his email:
Good morning Matt
Does your analysis on salaries vs. batter production apply when putting together a stack or do you suggest doing the stack with the top of the order and then filling in the rest using your targeted salary ranges?
Thanks
Matt
That’s a great question on its own, and it gets to a much bigger general question: When we are making lineup decisions and salary-based production history is just one of several factors to take into account, how heavily should we weight it? How important is it in comparison to matchup, implied Vegas total, peripheral circumstances, recent and long-term advanced stats, recent and long-term fantasy production, ownership arbitrage concerns, game theory (in guaranteed prize pools), etc.?
I’m definitely not going to reach definitive answers to those questions in this article, but I want to explore these questions and discuss how I think people should be treating salary-based production history right now.
Immediate Concerns vs. Long-Term Odds
Knowing the salary sweet spots for FanDuel and DraftKings batters is great — but the edge it provides in any given slate is relatively small. Over the long run, you could be massively profitable if you consistently built your lineups so as to maximize the number of times you roster players located in the salary sweet spots. The problem, however, is that you need to have a long-term vision in order to focus on the incremental benefits of the edge, because in any given slate and for any given player you can always find reasons to roster someone from a suboptimal salary tier instead of someone from an ideal tier.
Consistently exploiting this edge is an old man’s strategy . . . but old men don’t have a long enough timeframe to benefit from the edge. And most young men don’t have the long-term perspective to find the strategy exciting enough to employ. As a result, this edge will be used almost exclusively by the young men who were basically born old — or, phrased more politely, by those who have wisdom beyond their years.
To summarize:
- In any given slate/matchup, it would be very easy to weight all other factors more heavily than salary-based production history.
- If you consistently let other factors override the salary sweet spot, you will probably be making suboptimal decisions over a long period of time.
So what are we to do?
What to Do
If you are laid back, then you could choose not to sweat your salary-influenced decisions in any given slate. Instead you’d keep track of your process so that you could monitor the situation over a larger number of slates. If you found that you were underweight on valuable tiers and/or overweight on suboptimal tiers, then you could make adjustments moving forward, being more cognizant of your tendencies.
Or, if you are like me — the type of person who makes really extreme and arbitrary decisions for the most seemingly insignificant of reasons — then you could immediately take a two-pronged approach, similar to the one I recommended in my article on Black Swans:
- Emphasize the positive, by purposely targeting players from the best salary tiers.
- Mitigate the negative, by immediately shunning players from the suboptimal tiers.
I think that the second point is actually the more important one. If all you do is eliminate from consideration the players who tend not to provide value — in this case, the batters from negative tiers — then you will inherently improve your chances of rostering better players over time, regardless of whether they reside in great tiers or merely acceptable ones.
So, in general, I would do my best every slate simply to avoid almost all of the players from the negative tiers. And the exceptions — the ‘suboptimal’ players I would roster — I would have specific reasons for not eliminating, the biggest of which would probably be . . .
Stacking: The Beginning Is Often the End
Let’s get back to the question originally posed by ‘Other Matt’: “Do you suggest doing the stack with the top of the order and then filling in the rest using your targeted salary ranges?” I guess the answer is this: “It depends.”
If the stack is for cash games — and I’m not really thinking about game theory, ownership percentages, etc. — then I want to maximize the mix of factors that will give me the best mix of Plus/Minus and Consistency and thus give me the best chance to reach the cash line. In most circumstances, batters in the top half of the order do better than those in the bottom half, so if I identify a team to stack in cash games then I will probably want to stack players in the top half. Salary-based production history might factor in some, but there are other stack-oriented factors that will most likely (and deservedly) take precedent.
And that’s especially the case in GPPs, in which game theory and ownership percentages seem to override everything else.
In a perfect world, I’ll find a team with a high Vegas total and batters who are all in good spots and ideal salary tiers. But that hardly ever happens. So when I’m stacking in cash games, I’ll try to keep salary-based production history in mind, using it as a tiebreaker when possible. If I can’t get at least two players with ideal salaries in a stack, I might just avoid that stack. But, still, the relative importance of salary-based production history will be diminished.
And in GPPs the salary sweet spots will be even more irrelevant. I’ll target them when I can, but the sweet spots are about optimality — and GPPs are about volatility and unpredictability. I don’t see the point in hunting elephants with a bow.
Of course, in either format, if I have the opportunity to roster a compelling non-stacked batter with a historically positive salary, I absolutely will.
Matt, I’m not sure how successfully I answered your question — but I did get a 1,200-word piece out of it, and that’s what’s really important, amirite?
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The Labyrinthian: 2016, 64
Previous installments of The Labyrinthian can be accessed via my author page. If you have suggestions on material I should know about or even write about in a future Labyrinthian, please contact me via email, [email protected], or Twitter @MattFtheOracle.
