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 season.
5/15: Pitch Counts
I always try to have a healthy level of skepticism when a pitcher is making his first start following an extended absence. Even on DraftKings, which lacks FanDuel’s quality start bonus, a pitch count can lower a pitcher’s floor and ceiling. Worst of all, pitch counts aren’t always announced ahead of time. There is nothing worse than watching your DFS pitcher get yanked in the fifth inning after 80 pitches.
On Monday, both Brandon McCarthy and Sean Manaea were pitchers I would have otherwise had interest in based on their matchups, but I wanted to be cautious because both had been out for extended measures. Although I did not see strict pitch counts announced for either pitcher, both were coming off of abbreviated rehab starts.
McCarthy seemed to be rated among the top three or four pitchers in every Player Model. Pitchers in McCarthy’s general salary range on DraftKings with a recent pitch count below 80 actually exceed salary-based expectations with a Consistency Rating above 50 percent:
However, the negative Plus/Minus indicates that, in 37 cases, such pitchers have exhibited low ceilings and floors.
Results
On a slate without many great pitching options, McCarthy was 22.7 percent owned across the four contests we track in our DFS Ownership Dashboard, but he had a troubling -8.06 Volatility Score, indicating he had much higher ownership in the tournaments with lower stakes (29.06 percent) than higher stakes (19.44 percent). Despite a positive matchup against the Giants, McCarthy couldn’t make it out of the fifth inning, giving up six earned runs en route to only 5.35 fantasy points, a number well short of his value threshold.
5/16: Solid Pitchers in Great Spots
On Tuesday, the Cubs were likely to be chalky with an implied Vegas total that approached and at times exceeded 7.0 runs. Although several aces were available, including Yu Darvish, Stephen Strasburg, and Dallas Keuchel, if you wanted to stack the Cubs then you probably needed to save some money at pitcher.
J.C. Ramirez emerged as a popular candidate due to his low DraftKings salary of $6,600 and matchup against the White Sox, who have been abysmal vs right-handed pitching in 2017. Ramirez’s combination of salary and moneyline were relatively rare, as he was just the 24th pitcher this season to have a moneyline between -200 and -150 with a salary between $5,000 and $7,000. Also, Ramirez had Hal Gibson III behind home plate. Gibson is one of only 12 umpires who have added more than 200 total points of Plus/Minus value to pitching production in games officiated.
Results
Ramirez turned out to have the highest ownership at his position and the fourth-highest ownership overall, behind Cubs Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber, and Ian Happ. Ramirez took advantage of his matchup, throwing seven innings of two-run ball, but the Angels bullpen blew the game, costing Ramirez the win bonus. Still, he hit his implied point total right on the nose and allowed for heavy Cubs exposure at his cheap cost.
5/17: Opponent Bullpen Strength
On Wednesday, I wanted to explore our new Opponent Bullpen Strength metric. Simply put, this filter assigns a high score to opposing bullpens that have pitched a high number of innings recently and as a result may be overworked. ‘Rest’ is a concept that we weight heavily in NBA and NFL, as we downgrade basketball players in back-to-back games and football players in Thursday contests, but rest isn’t often explored in MLB, even though players play much more frequently.
Also, with Opp BP Strength we’re getting into game script a little bit, another theme that is more common in other sports. Specifically, if we’re going to target an opposing bullpen, we want to know the team we’re selecting players from can score enough runs early in the game to force the opposing starting pitcher out. And we also want the opposing bullpen to be worth targeting in the first place. For example, I don’t care how many innings the Astros bullpen has pitched recently: It’s probably not a positive expected value strategy to target their league-leading 3.34 Expected Field Independent Pitching (xFIP).
On Wednesday’s slate, the Royals bullpen was extremely overworked, which resulted in a 99 Opp BP score for the Yankees. The Royals bullpen was a disaster at the beginning of the season, but they’ve somewhat turned it around recently. Still, I don’t think they have a bullpen we need to avoid.
Given that the Yankees were decent -132 favorites with an implied Vegas total of 4.6 runs, I figured they had a shot to get past Royals starter Jason Vargas and into the bullpen. With our Trends tool, I created a trend based on their Vegas data and Opp BP, and I also added a Pro Trends filter (eight to 12) to make sure that I wasn’t selecting batters in totally awful spots:
Encouraged by the results, I loaded in a Yankees stack consisting of Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge, Brett Gardner, and Matt Holliday.
Results
Average ownership for the Yankees was as follows:
- Sanchez: 24.9 percent
- Judge: 13.3 percent
- Gardner: 2.4 percent
- Holliday: 6.68 percent
As I had hoped, the Yankees knocked out Vargas early in the game and were able to add five runs against Kansas City’s bullpen. Although the Yankees scored 11 total runs, it was a balanced attack, which isn’t ideal for GPPs:
Still, I pretty much got what I wanted in terms of game flow, and I can be relatively confident that I was exploiting an angle (Kansas City’s overworked bullpen) that most DFS players probably overlooked.
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Thanks for following along with my three custom trends this week. As always, there’s plenty more left to be explored via the Labs tools.
