This is a weekly series that follows MLB trends created with our Trends tool. Although the trends in this series are made with specific slates in mind, they are designed to remain relevant throughout the course of the season.
4/17 – Batted Ball Luck
Pitching was tricky on Monday. At the top, you had Danny Salazar, notorious for control issues, facing a Minnesota Twins team that is patient against righties. Minnesota had also beaten Salazar up over their past few matchups. And then (on DraftKings) $100 cheaper than Salazar was John Lackey, who was facing a Brewers lineup that has struck out quite a bit but has also flashed power over the opening weeks of the season.
Of course, Salazar and Lackey both had in common a negative Recent Batted Ball Luck Score over their first two starts, with Salazar at -39 and Lackey at -50. These scores indicated that both pitchers were ‘lucky’ in that we would have expected them to have scored fewer fantasy points over the past 15 days based on their batted ball distance allowed. (The Batted Ball Luck metric is available in our Player Models.)
The trend I set up for Monday’s slate looked for pitchers with average batted ball distances of less than 200 feet. Over 3,891 results, pitchers matching this trend have historically had a +1.5 Plus/Minus on DraftKings:
The night’s match was Brandon McCarthy, who had limited the Padres and Cubs to soft contact in early April. McCarthy was facing the Diamondbacks, who were Vegas underdogs implied to score only 3.3 runs.
As it turned out, McCarthy didn’t have a ground-breaking game, but he was still able to pay off his low $7,900 salary, posting a +4.0 Plus/Minus. He was significantly lower-owned than Salazar and Lackey across all stakes (per our Ownership Dashboard). Lackey had an average ownership of 62.93 percent and sunk a large chunk of the field by scoring only 4.7 DraftKings points.
4/18 – Building Pitcher Profiles
On Tuesday, my preliminary lineups led me back to Cleveland’s bats. I knew which pitchers I wanted to build around, and once I began creating actual lineups guys like Michael Brantley and Francisco Lindor kept appearing on my teams.
Brantley was still somewhat working his way back from a long-term injury and perhaps not yet 100 percent, so his matchup was even more important in this case. I wanted to know how Brantley performed against pitchers like Phil Hughes, Cleveland’s opponent. I quickly set up the following trend, which matched pitchers who are similar to Hughes (low strikeout righties), and I found that Brantley has done well in these games:
Brantley’s ownership on DraftKings was a reasonable seven percent, as most players went with Bryce Harper or Ryan Braun in the same general price range.
Whenever you roster a bat against Hughes with his fly ball tendencies, you’re hoping for a home run. While Brantley did not leave the yard, he did score three times en route to 16 fantasy points. He outpaced both Harper and Braun, although neither was terrible, scoring 14 and 10 points.
One point to add: You might think that all batters would fare better against low-strikeout pitchers, but that is not the case. In later articles I might highlight some players who aren’t better against low-strikeout pitchers. For now, it’s enough to say that being able to determine what types of pitchers individual batters struggle and excel against is a great benefit of the Trends tool.
4/19/17 – Welcome to SunTrust
One of the most notorious home-away splits in baseball belongs to Julio Teheran. Over 53 starts in our database, Teheran has averaged 18.75 points at home and 15.74 on the road, resulting in a Plus/Minus differential that exceeds three points. At home and coming off two decent starts, Teheran may have appeared to be a reasonable play on Wednesday despite facing the tough Nationals offense.
The huge caveat here is that Wednesday represented Teheran’s first start in Atlanta’s new home, SunTrust Park, which raised this question: Was Teheran’s performance at Turner Field boosted by the comfort of playing in front of Atlanta’s fans or did it have more to do with how his batted ball profile matched up with Turner’s dimensions? SunTrust’s dimensions aren’t drastically different, but we place so much weight on ballparks in MLB DFS, and it would be foolish to assume Teheran’s skills will be unaffected by the move.
I’m not going to sugarcoat the truth: Having only five games’ worth of data on a ballpark is a problem. While our Park Factor metric is based on hundreds of games for all other ballparks, our Park Factor for SunTrust is currently based on a much smaller sample. Being ahead of the curve in Atlanta will provide an advantage, and that’s why my trend for Wednesday was simple:
Teheran was minimally owned, appearing in only around two percent of the lineups across the four DraftKings tournaments we track. And that’s good because he bombed, scoring -5 points. Whether the ‘Teheran at home’ angle will have any weight moving forward and whether SunTrust will favor batters or pitchers moving forward are huge unknowns right now. Luckily, we can set up a simple trend like the one above to track the results.
Conclusion
Most of the trends in this series going back to last week have focused on players. General trends are great, but what can be lost sometimes are individual player tendencies. Moreover, while we have a library of Pro Trends that focus on league-wide trends, we have none that focus on individual players. Fire up the Trends tool and become more acquainted with the players who win and lose money for us every day.
