FanDuel Mixup contests have weekly changing themes and abbreviated rosters. This week’s theme is “Road Warriors” and has a roster of two pitchers and three utility players:
As suggested by the title, this week you can roster only players on the road. If you’re new to the Mixup format be sure to check out Bryan Mears’ introductory piece, which covers some details on pricing and game theory.
Lets look at some potential strategy for this week’s Mixups.
Pitchers
Unsurprisingly, pitchers have historically fared significantly worse on the road than at home in both raw fantasy points and Plus/Minus:
This fact might make selecting pitchers difficult. On Monday’s slate, for example, only two road pitchers are favored and neither one has an opponent implied team total lower than four runs. Ultimately, only one of Monday’s top-eight pitchers in the Bales Model is on a road team. This is an extreme example, but it highlights the crux of this Mixup: Finding desirable pitchers on the road isn’t easy.
As a result, it might make more since than ever to pay up for pitching. Pitchers priced at $9,000 or higher have still managed to post a Plus/Minus of +0.52 on the road, but pitchers priced under that threshold have historically been subpar:
Back to Monday’s slate: A guy like Yu Darvish will likely be chalky even in a tough matchup against the Astros. He leads all road pitchers with a K Prediction of 6.5 and has historically been solid away from home (per our Trends tool):
Masahiro Tanaka will likely be another popular target, especially since he’s away from from the home run haven that is Yankee Stadium and in the more pitcher-friendly confines of Angel Stadium. He’s historically done well when pitching on the road in venues with similar Park Factors:
Locking in that kind of safety with your pitchers and diversifying your lineups with your hitters is probably the long-term winning strategy.
Batters
Luckily, targeting hitters on the road is much easier than targeting pitchers. Historically, batters have been only marginally better at home than on the road:
In fact, road teams have significantly outperformed home teams when favored:
Identifying road favorites with our Vegas Dashboard will likely be the first step to finding productive Mixup batters this week.
For Monday’s slate, the Orioles are currently -110 moneyline favorites and lead all road teams with an implied team total of 5.4 runs. The Yankees are the largest road favorites of the day with -132 moneyline odds. Both of them could be chalky.
Given the importance of Statcast data, there’s probably an edge to be gained by targeting road players in good recent form. Batters with distance differentials of +20 to +50 feet have historically provided more fantasy value on the road than at home:
In today’s projected lineups, there are 13 players who currently match this trend, including five Yankees. Given that they’re favored and the highest-scoring team in the league with 5.88 runs per game, the Yankees are a strong team to target in Monday’s slate, especially since the Orioles (with a higher implied total) will likely have more ownership. Although Mixup ownership isn’t tracked in our DFS Ownership Dashboard, the larger ownership trends seen there will likely be applicable to to Mixups. The same is true for other FantasyLabs Tools.
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Good luck, and be sure to read the MLB Breakdown for more insight into today’s slate!
