During most of the NBA season this year, I wrote a weekly series called “NBA Trend Testing,” in which I would use the FantasyLabs Trends tool to create a custom trend and then track the results of my matches for the week. The goal is to create trends with high Plus/Minus values and share them with our readers. I will be doing the same thing during MLB season and will be posting an article every Friday which will review the past week’s custom trend.
On FanDuel especially, where there is only one pitcher spot per lineup, going safe at pitcher is essential. In cash games, it’s easy to overcome a dud from a couple of your hitters as long as your lineup is solid elsewhere, but if your pitcher gets knocked around you might as well start planning for the next day’s slate.
One popular method people use is to select pitchers with high strikeout ratios. These types of pitchers can overcome earned runs and a loss by racking up K points. For example, on 4/6, Jose Fernandez went only 5 2/3 innings against Detroit, allowed five earned runs, did not win the game, yet still paid off his $11,200 salary on FanDuel thanks to 12 Ks.
Another approach you could take would be to maximize win probability and minimize runs against. There’s more than one way to do this, but with this trend I looked for groundball pitchers playing in pitcher’s parks. Admittedly, I almost always never use this method, instead opting to roster high-K pitchers because I think that strikeouts are easier for me to predict than wins and earned runs. That feeling is not completely backed by data though and maybe I will be awesome at finding winning pitchers who don’t give up runs. Luckily, it’s easy to find out with the help of our MLB Trends Tool.
Description
The filters that I used to create this trend are as follows:
• The player’s Season GB Rate is between 50-110
• The player’s Park Factor is between 60-100
First off, the Avg. Expected Pts. field surprised me a bit. An implied score of 28.49 points on FanDuel matches up with a salary around $7,700. I expected us to be able to find cheaper players using this trend. The good news is that, despite the higher-than-expected salary, pitchers have still been clearing value with regularity as evidence by the Plus/Minus score.
Results
Screenshots were taken from $5 GPP teams I entered throughout the week on FanDuel.
4/18
Obviously, Mike Leake was not a popular play on Monday — his ownership was a miniscule 0.7 percent. In fact, many players chose to target Leake with a Cubs stack. Honestly, when I go through these Trend Testing articles and I see some of the matches, there are times that I cringe and this was one of them. All things considered, though, Leake was able to do a decent job limiting the damage and he even ended up exceeding value due to an unexpected six strikeouts. On a day where Carlos Rodon collapsed on himself like a dying star while appearing on a fair number of rosters, I was actually able to gain ground on the field by rostering Leake and loading up on bats.
4/19
Liriano was the bust of the day, flopping at high ownership in a perceived easy matchup against the Padres. Alex Wood was an example of what can go wrong for this type of pitcher. When groundball pitchers are not in position for the win and they’ve let up a couple of runs, the lack of strikeouts is really going to hurt.
The best play of the day was probably Stephen Strasburg, who scored 66 fantasy points against the Marlins at under 10 percent ownership on the all-day slate. Strasburg actually just missed qualifying for this trend — his Park Factor rating was 91 (Marlins Park), but his 46 percent GB ratio fell just shy of the 50 percent threshold required by this trend.
This can be a lesson of sorts — Strasburg probably falls into the category of pitchers we want to target with this Trend, but because he fell just outside the cutoff point in one of the filters, we missed him. His Park Rating of 91 was an elite score considering the cutoff point in that category is 60. Don’t fall in love with hard threshold values because you like what the Plus/Minus says. Making minor adjustments can open you up to more of the types of plays for which you are looking.
4/20
Things continued to unravel on Wednesday with Ross Stripling and Jeff Locke. While picking on the Padres generally seems like a good thing to do, they have a .369 Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) against left-handed pitching this year, rank inside the top 10 in Team Isolated Power (ISO), and strike out less than 20 percent of the time. Due to their lack of lefty hitting, you can still pick on San Diego with righties, but it may be time to lay off with lefty pitchers for a bit.
That tangent was meant to distract you from the fact that, yes, I really only got eight combined fantasy points from these two pitchers.
4/21
Yesterday, the two qualifiers were Kershaw (good) and Mike Pelfrey (bad). Although there was some concern about Kershaw playing in the Eastern Time Zone in an early-start game on the road, he still easily exceeded value, even given his astronomical price tag. Pelfrey was a weak qualifier because A) He is actually not good and B) his 51 percent GB% and 68 Park Factor were both barely above the minimum thresholds. He responded by scoring only 12 fantasy points against an expectation of 24.16.
Review
Let’s be honest: There were several bad plays this week. No one should play Mike Pelfrey against the Tigers and no one should play Mike Leake against the Cubs. When you create a custom trend, you have to apply common sense. If you look at the Past Results and the Current Matches and you see players listed that you have no interest in, don’t be afraid to tweak the parameters, even if that results in a Plus/Minus decrease.
