So, you pull up the lineup page for the upcoming MLB slate. You see that the Blue Jays are at home and are projected for 5.0 runs. There’s no other team that’s projected for more than 4.2 runs in the slate. This is easy, right? Just play a Blue Jays stack and you’ll win.
As we all know, DFS doesn’t work like that – ownership is obviously big (everyone will play the Blue Jays), but also how a player is priced. Jose Bautista will be quite expensive in that situation, so he will obviously be expected to score more fantasy points to hit value.
This is why point projections are kind of silly to use – I mean, of course the best players are going to be projected for the most points. And if you try to incorporate something like a $/point system to rank the value of players, you’re really just going to flip your list. Minimum-salary players are going to be “valuable” because of such low expectations.
Judging players by a metric like Plus/Minus makes a lot more sense to me – let’s figure out what we should expect them to score and then see where they generally score. It’s not that far off from $/point in terms of the philosophy, but it’s a whole lot less fragile and puts everyone on an even playing field. This way, we’ll have a list of players who typically exceed value (and our value here is a tangible number), whether or not they’re minimum or high-salaried.
We should look at Vegas projected run totals in the same light – not every team that is projected to score four runs will do it the same way. For example, one team scoring four runs by hitting four home runs is much more valuable (56 points cumulatively) than a team scoring four runs by two walks and an RBI single four times (44 points cumulatively).
Here’s a table of each team’s runs per game (R/G) and their Plus/Minus on the season.
This shows us that pricing matters when looking at Vegas totals. On the Blue Jays again, they have scored the most runs per game this year (by quite a bit, too), yet their Plus/Minus is behind six other teams. They’re still valuable (+0.34), but the Dodgers, for example, have outperformed their salaries more, even though they haven’t scored as many runs.
Look at the Phillies – they’ve scored only 3.33 runs per game this season. Ouch. Yet, their Plus/Minus isn’t bad; in fact, it’s a positive number. They aren’t putting up a ton of runs, but they are exceeding (even if just slightly) what we’d expect based on their salaries.
Now obviously, Plus/Minus comes with a similar caveat as $/point models – a player at $2,500 exceeding salary by 10% is less valuable than a player doing the same at $5,000. But perhaps value can be found in the middle teams. The Padres and Dodgers have scored about the same runs per game on the season – 4.14 and 4.25, respectively – but their Plus/Minus’ are very different (-0.08 vs +0.59).
If you see the Dodgers and Padres both projected to score 3.8 runs, remember that the number isn’t equal. It sounds crazy to say that 3.8 > 3.8, but in some instances, it is. Site pricing and scoring dictates what is important – the Dodgers have hit 102 home runs on the season, while the Padres have only 65. While their runs per game are similar, the Dodgers have significantly outperformed them in terms of fantasy points. Vegas projections are important, but remember to look at them through the right lens.
