MLB Trend of the Day: Cheap FanDuel Pitchers With Good Moneylines

At FantasyLabs, we believe that we have the best tools and data available for those who play daily fantasy sports. We also realize that these tools and data are only as beneficial as our ability to communicate their functionality and worth.

With this in mind, our Trend of the Day series features articles that each weekday walk subscribers through an important trend, created with our Trends tool. Also, shortly after you create a trend, you will be able to see it under the “My Trends” column in our Player Models.

MLB Trend of the Day: Cheap FanDuel Pitchers With Good Moneylines

Because of the 12-point bonus for a pitcher win on FanDuel, it makes sense to try to find an edge in that regard. One way to do this is to create a trend that looks at cheaper pitchers with good Vegas moneylines.

Because of the scoring differences, FanDuel likely prices up pitchers based on their implied chances of winning. Since our Plus/Minus statistic is a salary-adjusted metric, we can use our Trends tool to test the assumption that pitchers likely to win have higher salaries.

For an unparalleled DFS edge, try our free Trends tool, through which you can access our massive database of advanced data and leverage our premium exclusive metrics, such as Bargain Rating, Upside, Consistency, and Plus/Minus.

If we find a positive Plus/Minus at the end of this trend, it will mean that — despite any positive Salary Change made by FanDuel — the pitchers implied to win are insufficiently priced up and thus still provide excess value.

Plus/Minus, Salary Change, and other premium exclusive metrics are accessible via our free Ratings tool.

Step 1: Player Filters > Salary > 5,000 to 8,000

Our sliders would let us go lower than this, but for the sake of creating balanced trends instead of “threshold” ones we’re going to keep it in this range — the range of players we would actually use. As you can see, this is not a positive range on the whole:

Step 2: Vegas Filters > Moneyline > -200 to -150

Again, we’re balancing this trend to make it representative. Most of our population is going to fall in this range, so we’ll use this. However, if you want to check out how the Plus/Minus changes as you adjust the moneyline parameters, feel free to create this trend yourself.

Players in this situation have outperformed their salary-based expectations by an average of 2.63 points. Predicting pitcher wins is not an exact science by any means, and perhaps it brings a bit of risk for cash games, but using a cheap pitcher (so that one can load up on bats) is a very intriguing tournament strategy, especially when that pitcher has a decent chance to win.

Current Matches

For this trend, we have one current match (who reportedly could be pushed to a higher pitch count):

Good luck!