FanDuel Mixup contests have weekly changing themes and abbreviated rosters. This week’s theme is “Stars & Stripes” and has a roster of two pitchers and three utility batters:
This week, 2017 All-Star pitchers are $10,000 and All-Star hitters are $5,000. Both marks are much lower than normal.
Let’s talk pricing and strategy.
Pricing
In my introductory Mixup strategy piece, I discuss how the five-player roster and pricing affects strategy and game theory. It seems as if FanDuel does not plan on changing that aspect of their Mixup contests: They again require two pitchers and three batters, and the salary cap is again $35,000.
In that article, I find that salaries in regular contests and Mixups have nearly perfect correlation:
Thus, one of my three main takeaways is that you can use our Models to research both pitchers and batters. If a player is mispriced in regular contests on FanDuel, he’ll be mispriced in Mixups. Here are the takeaways again:
- Although you have to roster two pitchers in Mixup contests, pricing is still soft because there are only five players in a single lineup.
- The edge in contests will probably be via ownership.
- Because of the near-perfect correlation between salaries, you can use Models for the all-day slate to analyze players this week.
Because all that changes on a weekly basis in these contests is which players you can roster, I’m going to focus more on those restrictions and how they affect strategy instead of pricing and roster construction. Refer to the original article for my full thoughts on those two aspects.
Strategy for Stars & Stripes
First things first, let’s get a list of the 2017 All Star players:
While we don’t have confirmed pitchers for every game this week, here’s the schedule at least as of Monday at noon ET. Games not in the main slate are italicized:
Houston stud Dallas Keuchel is the lone pitcher who is injured and not playing this week. Guys like Chris Sale will almost certainly play later this week, so make sure to check on probable pitchers for each team as they’re updated.
As mentioned earlier, the All-Stars are priced differently than usual, although the difference isn’t 1) equal for all players or 2) positive for some players. To measure this, we can use the MLB Trends tool to find the average 2017 FanDuel salaries for all the All-Stars, calculate their average hits against the salary cap, and then measure those numbers against their cap hits this week: 28.57 percent for pitchers and 14.29 percent for batters. Here’s how each player measures up:
These guys have high ownership rates even when they’re expensive. Now that they’re significantly discounted, where will their ownership levels be?
The batters naturally see a less extreme difference, although there are some batters who are borderline unusable this week, as the move to $5,000 (or 14.29 percent of the cap) is actually an increase compared to their average marks. An example of this is Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina, whose average salary of $2,900 this season (or 8.29 percent of the cap) is much lower than he’ll be this week. He’s drastically overpriced despite being an All-Star.
I believe the big edge this week will be fading the All-Stars, although that’s exactly the opposite of what FanDuel wants out of these contests. The first tweet about Mixups this week says, “This week on MLB Mixup, we’re making it easy to build an All Star lineup!” Indeed, thus it’s even more imperative to pay attention to ownership and fade the public.
Now, you could make the case that Kershaw holds just too much equity to fade at just $10,000. That’s a fair point. If you’re going to eat the high-owned All-Star chalk pitchers, make sure you’re combining them with contrarian batters. It’s easy to fit in a lineup almost entirely of All-Stars, but I would be surprised if such a lineup actually won a guaranteed prize pool this week. Good luck!
