FanDuel Mixup contests have weekly changing themes and abbreviated rosters. This week’s theme is “Summer Sandals” and has a roster of two pitchers and three utility batters:
This week, players from the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox are removed from the player pools.
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 found that salaries in regular contests and Mixups have nearly perfect correlation:
Thus, one of my three main takeaways was that you can use our Player Models to research both pitchers and batters. If a player is mispriced in regular contests on FanDuel, he’ll be mispriced in Mixups. Here were 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 Player 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 Summer Sandals
Honestly, the removal of just two teams for a week does very little to affect game theory or strategy. That’s especially true considering the two teams removed — the Red Sox and the White Sox — rank 25th and 23rd in the league this season with team ISO marks of .147 and .154. They’re right around those same rankings in home runs this season, ranking 28th and 24th with 67 and 76. Extra-base hits and home runs win guaranteed prize pools (GPPs), and these two teams don’t accumulate either often. People weren’t rostering Boston and Chicago stacks at a high rate, so this week’s rules don’t affect the batters very much.
That said, the removal of Chris Sale is significant; he’s projected to pitch tomorrow in Kansas City against a poor Royals lineup. He will certainly be the chalk in the main slate. He’s first in the league by a mile in pitching Wins Above Replacement (WAR) . . .
. . . and among pitchers with at least three starts he’s second behind only Max Scherzer with an average of 50.57 FanDuel points per game and a +13.1 Plus/Minus. His 92.9 percent Consistency Rating — the rate at which he has exceeded salary-based expectations — is also one of the best marks in the league. He has been owned in a massive percentage of lineups every slate with an average GPP ownership of 41.1 percent (per our MLB Trends tool), and he’s even been above 60 percent in three slates this year:
Removing him from any slate will alter the ownership balance significantly.
Also, what’s notable about Sale’s exclusion from tomorrow’s Mixup slate is that it features a game at Coors Field. This will be the third main slate of the season in which Sale has pitched in a Coors Field slate. The first one was on May 30, and Sale was owned in 34.8 percent of contests, having been owned at 57.9 percent in his prior start. It was a 14-game slate that included high-priced pitchers like Robbie Ray and Luis Severino, and 12 of the 28 teams had implied run totals of 4.5-plus runs. In large slates, ownership is more distributed: Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado was owned in 14.0 percent of FanDuel GPPs that day, for reference.
In the second Sale/Coors slate (on June 15), Sale was owned in 51.0 percent of contests, and Arenado was in 23.9 percent of contests. That was a just a seven-game main slate, and Sale was the highest-priced pitcher by $2,000 (per our DFS Ownership Dashboard):
My point is that each slate is different, and we won’t be able to deal with Sale’s theoretical absence until we know other data points like Vegas lines, projected lineups, etc. But Sale has an ownership floor the absence of which will be felt.
Tomorrow, the two best non-Sale pitchers will likely be Zack Greinke and Brandon McCarthy, although the former is at Coors Field. Sale’s price will likely be much higher than any other pitcher, so the slate from 6/15, although it was smaller than tomorrow’s 15-gamer, will likely be a closer comp in main slates than the one on 5/30. Without Sale, ownership will be distributed among the other pitchers, which means that Coors batters will be especially chalky. Pivoting away from those teams — the Rockies and Diamondbacks, both of which have dynamic lineups — will be key to building a contrarian lineup.
Good luck!
