Recently, DraftKings changed their MLB rules. I wrote my initial thoughts on those here and we’ll have a podcast coming soon where we discuss both DraftKings’ and FanDuel’s changes. But I also want to provide some data from our Trends tool and show specifically why I think DK’s rule changes could make things pretty chalky come Opening Day.
This is a really easy Trend to run, but I think you can see why it’s really important to note now. Here’s the Plus/Minus – actual fantasy points minus expected fantasy points based on salary – for hitters based purely on batting order.
As you can see, hitters in the first five spots of the batting order have seen an average positive Plus/Minus historically. That matches up too perfectly with DraftKings’ new stacking rules – you can only stack five hitters this year from a single team as opposed to six – and people will intuitively go for the value play and as a result you’ll see a ton of lineup overlap of 1-5 stacks.
The rule changes, combined with the data, do make game theory in MLB DFS really interesting this year. My hypothesis, as stated above and in the article from a couple weeks ago, is that things are going to be really chalky, especially early on. People, by human nature, naturally avoid risk and seek safety and value. There was a bit of a tradeoff – as shown by the picture above – last year in terms of giving up technical value (what I mean is the sixth hitter, by himself, was technically not a value on average) to create upside with a full six-man stack. This year, you can get a full stack in and not give up value.
Of course, you could always add in additional filters in our Trends tool. For example, the value of the 6-9 hitters goes way up as implied team runs do:
This is probably not a big surprise, but even 6-9 hitters are valuable in terms of Plus/Minus when their teams are implied to score a bunch of runs. And that makes sense – even if their teammates in earlier spots are the ones doing a lot of the heavy lifting, a rising tide lifts all boats in MLB. Their teammates scoring, and thus not getting out, means more at-bat opportunities for those guys (which is a pretty big part of why they have lower value than earlier guys, outside of the natural talent disparity).
In fact, once you get to about 5.0 implied team runs, almost every position in the batting order is a value:
But even in the midst of all that green, you can see that the biggest drop is between batting order five and six. This will largely be the case even if you add all sorts of filters to find hidden value (which you should and this will be a very large, ongoing topic of our writing this year). The best values are so clearly in the top-five spots — finding other ways to create a valuable, cohesive lineup outside of merely stacking 1-5 will be paramount to finding a unique lineup required to take down a GPP.
The point in all this is DraftKings’ rules now heavily align with the natural value already found in MLB DFS. This will make it chalkier, but it will also make it more advantageous to be contrarian in GPPs. Our Trends tool – as shown in the simple query above regarding high-implied totals – is a great way to find hidden value, or value that isn’t quite as obvious as the 1-5 hitters. They’re the low-hanging fruit this year and how you deal with that will largely determine profitability, especially early in the season.
