This is a weekly series that follows MLB trends created with our Trends tool. Although the trends in this series are made with specific slates in mind, they are designed to remain relevant throughout the season.
6/6 – Increasing Distance
Last week, I leveraged opposing pitcher recent performance when selecting hitters. This week, I started with a couple of trends that further this idea. First, I applied the ‘Opp Distance Allowed % – 15’ hitter filter, which assigns a percentile rank to the average distance allowed by the opposing pitcher over the past 15 days. A higher percentile is more advantageous for batters.
Setting that filter to 95-100, I was looking for batters facing pitchers who have allowed long batted ball distances. Considering no additional Vegas, lineup order, or split filters were applied to the trend, I’m impressed with the +0.83 Plus/Minus over a large sample:
With an average ownership around five percent, these batters don’t seem to be popular. It’s likely that DFS players aren’t making a point to to target pitchers with long batted ball distances.
The most intriguing Tuesday matches for this trend were the Mariners, who faced Hector Santiago, an extreme fly ball pitcher who had allowed an incredible 65 percent fly ball rate and slate-worst batted ball distance of 250 feet over his previous three starts.
Results
Santiago could not make it out of the third inning and was charged for five earned runs. As an added bonus, the Mariners then continued teeing off against Minnesota’s bottom-tier bullpen, scoring 12 runs in total. A middle of the order Danny Valencia–Robinson Cano–Nelson Cruz–Kyle Seager stack netted 80 DraftKings points at reasonable ownership.
6/6 – Added Speed
Along the same lines, it is possible to query an opposing pitcher’s recent exit velocity allowed using the ‘Opportunity EV Allowed % – 15’. When working with all data, especially Statcast data, I try to put that data into context. If a ground ball pitcher were allowing a recent batted ball distance of 225 feet, for example, that would be much more concerning than if Max Scherzer, a flyball pitcher, had a recent batted ball distance of 225 feet: Scherzer’s mark tends to be fairly high anyway — but that doesn’t get in the way of his pitching.
Circling back to Tuesday’s second trend: I was looking for batters facing pitchers who tend to have low long-term exit velocities but whose short-term exit velocities are elevated. Specifically, I’m targeting pitchers whose long-term exit velocities fall below 90 miles per hour but who rank in the bottom fifth percentile in recent exit velocity.
Overall, batters who match this trend provide value at reduced ownership:
Although it feels like a cop out to feature a game at Coors Field, Colorado’s bats were actually projected to be somewhat low-owned against Mike Clevinger due to an abundance of ace pitchers on the slate. Over 19 starts in the past calendar year, Clevinger trailed only Brandon McCarthy on Tuesday with an impressive exit velocity of 89 miles per hour — but Clevinger’s 92 mph recent exit velocity entering the game was the second-worst mark in the slate.
Ownership projections can be found each day in our Player Models.
Results
Overshadowed by Scooter Gennett and his unreal four-homer performance, Mark Reynolds had the second-highest batting score with 34 fantasy points. Carlos Gonzalez and Charlie Blackmon also provided helpful scores of 29 and 19 points. Although Gonzalez had a 17.83 percent average ownership rate (per our DFS Ownership Dashboard), both Reynolds and Blackmon appeared in less than 10 percent of all guaranteed prize pool lineups.
6/7 – An Ironic Time to Buy
On Wednesday’s slate, Zack Greinke cost $12,400 on DraftKings, nearly $5,000 more than he cost in his first start of the season. Despite his six percent Bargain Rating, Greinke still had a lot going for him. Specifically, he was a home favorite with a 7.6 K Prediction. But with Dallas Keuchel available at $12,500 and Yu Darvish nearly $2,000 less, I thought that Greinke might feel too expensive for some.
While you would think that a poor Bargain Rating would lead to a negative Plus/Minus, that hasn’t necessarily been the case. In fact, high-priced pitchers favored at home with comparable K Predictions tend to do well even with poor Bargain Ratings:
Sure, we’d always like to buy players when they are cheap, but sometimes even assets that are ‘overpriced’ are still too cheap. In large GPPs, if that overpricing can lead to reduced ownership, then that may even be an ironically good time to buy. Keep in mind that while success in cash games tends to be more about value, success in GPPs tends to be more about ownership.
Results
We’re never going to know what Greinke’s ownership would have been had the unexpected not occurred. Keuchel was scratched minutes prior to first pitch and players on Keuchel pivoted to Greinke, who played later and was $100 cheaper:
As noted by Ryan Sheppard in the MLB Ownership Review for June 7, the high-stakes players in the $5,300 Thunderdome switched off Keuchel almost entirely, while many of the low-stakes players in the $4 Four-Seamer did not react in time.
Perhaps this is a reminder that there’s no time like the present to learn how to swap players in and out of lineups. It’s a skill that you don’t need — until you do.
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Thanks for following along with my three custom trends this week. As always, there’s plenty more left to be explored via the Labs Tools.
