With Opening Day fast approaching, I’m going to take the next two Fridays to use our Trends tool to highlight a few trends that will be applicable for the 4/4 MLB slate. We obviously don’t know exactly who will be starting on each team, but I’ll aim to give you a good starting point with these trends. Each week, I will create one trend for pitchers and one for hitters. Let’s get started.

Pitcher Trend for 4/4

On Opening Day, teams will have their ace on the mound. This will inevitably lead to some lopsided mismatches as we pit elite pitchers against subpar offenses. Let’s look at how ace pitchers have performed against the worst offenses over the past couple of seasons on DraftKings.

Step 1 > Player Filters > Salary > Set “$11,000 to $15,700”

 

Missing on a pitcher in this price range could be disastrous. Fortunately, the +2.24 Plus/Minus and 59.2% Consistency Rating show that elite pitchers generally provide a solid return on investment, despite their high cost.

Step 2 > Team Filters > Opponent Win% > Set “20% to 45%”

 

Well, that is pretty unexpected. When looking only at elite pitchers who are facing opponents with a winning percentage of .450 or worse, we actually lose about a fantasy point and a half per start. What is the cause of this? I have no idea, and the sample size isn’t huge, but the results are surprising nonetheless. If we open up the “Past Results” section, we can see that there have been several meltdowns:

 

Of note, if I were to change the winning percentage from 20%-45% to 20%-40%, the Plus/Minus goes up to +2.30. However, there are only 63 matches and only two teams finished last season with a winning percentage that low. Also interesting is that the +2.30 here is still only marginally better than the +2.24 baseline score (elite pitchers vs. any opponent).

Let’s try tackling this from a different perspective now. Instead of using opponent winning percentage, let’s see what happens when we use Vegas instead.

Step 3 > Remove Opponent Winning Percentage filter
Step 4 > Vegas Filters > Spread > Set “-1.5 to -1”

 

That’s a little bit better, but we are still seeing very little separation from the baseline score of +2.24. The thing about spring baseball is that we don’t necessarily “know” who the bad teams are yet. We have an idea, but we don’t know for sure. With that in mind, let’s look at the results by month

Step 5 > Time Filters > Open “Month”

 

The two lowest scores are April (+1.3) and May (+0.8). It’s not just a pricing thing either: Elite pitchers in June have scored about 5.5 more fantasy points per start in June than in April when favored by a run or more. I’ll get to what exactly I make of this in the conclusion, but before we move on I’m going to set up a custom Trend that I’ll be able to take advantage of a couple months from now:

 

Batter Trend for 4/4

Last May, I wrote a bunch of words about Brandon Belt and the situations in which he performs well. In short, he does well away from AT&T Park against righties. Looking ahead to 4/4, Belt will be playing at Miller Park and facing Wily Peralta, who will probably be one of the shakier Opening Day starters once all the lineups are in.

Step 1 > Player Filters > Player Name > Select “Brandon Belt”

 

Overall, Belt typically exceeds his implied point total by 0.41 fantasy points per game.

Step 2 > Opp Pitcher Throws > Set “R”

 

When we only look at his results against righties, we come close to doubling the Plus/Minus, up to +0.77.

Step 3 > Team Filters > Home / Visitor

Here’s where we’re going to add the most value. Let’s take a look at the split:

 

By playing Belt only in away games against right-handed pitchers, we can expect an average of 8.88 DraftKings points per game. That number is right around what Nelson Cruz, Jose Altuve, and Kris Bryant averaged per game last season.

Conclusion

Surprisingly, elite pitchers didn’t gain much value when facing either A) Teams with poor winning percentages, or B) Heavy underdogs. It’s certainly not a bad play, but it doesn’t seem to be a much better play than if you were to play an elite pitcher against “any” team.

Furthermore, elite pitchers who are heavy favorites have posted their worst fantasy scores in March and April. This may be because we aren’t as confident in who the best and worst teams in the league are yet. Once we have more data, in June and July, we see the Plus/Minus soar in this category.

On the other side of the plate, there are only so many instances every year when Brandon Belt is A) healthy, B) facing a shaky right-hander, and C) playing away from AT&T Park. The stars will be aligning on MLB Opening Day and this could be a good spot to differentiate your lineup at a typically loaded position.