The Plus/Minus tool is among the most powerful ones that we can use to evaluate players on a daily basis here at Fantasy Labs. I started throwing together a few custom trends earlier and was surprised to see that over the past half-year or so, two players have really been dominating this category on FanDuel. (“To learn more about our innovative Plus/Minus stat, click here.“)
Let’s get started by taking a look at matches for players with a Plus/Minus over +0.7 against right-handed pitchers:
Okay, Rizzo and Brantley are great plays against right-handed pitching. Maybe the frequency with which they appear is a little surprising, but you probably didn’t need me to tell you that. Stay with me for a second. Before we move on though, I do want to point out that the above screenshot only contains what I could feasibly fit onto the screen. There are many more consecutive Rizzo-Brantley results until we finally get to Victor Martinez back on 9/8/2014!
Here’s the next search, this time we are looking for a Plus/Minus over +0.7 against lefties:
Look at the results closely – I am not, in fact, reusing the same picture to save space on our web server; this is a completely different query being performed. Now, I don’t know what your reaction to seeing this is, but mine was pretty much, “WHAT?!” This is not just Plus/Minus for lefties against lefties, this is everyone against lefties – Cruz, Donaldson, Bautista, pick a name, any name, they’re all part of the pool.
Here is each player’s split over 2014-2015 from Fangraphs:
| Player | Hand | wOBA | ISO |
| Brantley | L | .378 | .163 |
| Brantley | R | .398 | .193 |
| Rizzo | L | .438 | .212 |
| Rizzo | R | .396 | .254 |
So Rizzo has more power vs. righties and a dramatically higher wOBA vs. lefties. Brantley is better vs. righties in both categories, but the splits are nothing crazy. Really, Brantley is the player I want to focus on for this next point because he does have the small drop-off in production vs. lefties. I think that, while Brantley’s vs. L numbers are still pretty good in a vacuum, there may be a tendency for DFS players to feel like they are getting a “bad deal” when buying on the wrong side of a split. I think this little study shows that type of generalization is not always correct and, in some cases, can prevent you from picking one of the top plays on the board for that day.
