MLB DFS Tips: Beginners Tips and Tricks!
MLB DFS Tips: How new players can get started building winning lineups day after day!
One of the toughest sports for beginners to play on Fanduel and Draftkings is baseball. It can be infuriating to watch as a no name second baseman, (who for reasons you can’t figure out is 30% owned) hits a home run that puts you out of the money. A night like that can put someone off of DFS baseball for good, but it doesn’t have to get to that point. Whether it makes sense to you or not, there is a reason that player was 30% owned and if you know what to look for your DFS scores will drastically increase. Behind every DFS point is a story told by advanced statistics, the key to making money consistently is being able to identify the important stats. Every baseball fan knows the easy stats, (batting average, home runs, rbi’s, etc.) but not many know about the really advanced stats that all of the DFS pros make their money off of.
Next: How to Use BvP in moderation
One of the most popular things to look at for many beginners when trying to find batters for a night of Fanduel baseball is to look for who has the best average versus the starting pitcher they happen to be facing. Strictly using Batter vs Pitcher stats, (BvP for short), to roster a lineup is one of the easiest ways in the book to lose a lot of money over the long run in daily fantasy sports.
Here’s an example, Miguel Cabrera might theoretically be 10-20 with 5 hr’s against a run of the mill left handed pitcher, you roster Miggy, he hits a home run and your lineup ends up winning that night. You start to think that you’ve cracked the code and the next night you see that Adrian Gonzalez is 5-10 with 2 hr’s against the starting pitcher he’s going up against. Before even checking to see who the pitcher is, you throw A-Gon into all of your lineups. One problem though, that pitcher happens to be Jacob DeGrom of the New York Mets. DeGrom is one of the best pitchers in all of baseball and wins the battle with Gonzalez who goes 0-4 with 3 k’s. Your lineups crash horribly and you end up losing all of the money you won the night before.
This is part of the problem with strictly using BvP stats, you’re blindly ignoring all of the other statistics based on the past success the hitter. This is not to say that BvP stats can’t help you win, but like everything in life, they must be used in moderation. For example, Bryce Harper might be killing right handed pitching and Matt Harvey has been struggling mightily against lefties, (and basically everyone for that matter this season,) however Harper is currently 1-24 against Harvey in his career. In a case like this, you stay away from Harper as the sample size is large enough where spending $4,500 on Harper simply doesn’t make sense.
Next: How to use WoBA to your advantage
While I just stressed using BvP in moderation, WoBA on the other hand should be used every single night when making lineups on both Fanduel and Draftkings. What is WoBA you might ask? It stands for “Weighted on Base Average” and is probably the most valuable statistic when playing a daily baseball game. What WoBA attempts to do is weight hits differently based on how many total bases the batter gets. For example, a double is weighted more than a single, a triple is weighted more than a double, etc. for something like dfs where you gain more points for doubles, triples, and home runs, it becomes obvious how valuable this statistic can be.
One of the more popular ways to roster a lineup is by stacking players from the same team, theory being of course that if the team scores a lot of runs you’ll get a lot of points. A very popular play last year was stacking the Blue Jays against left handed pitching, diving deeper into this you see that the big bats on the Jays had extremely high WoBA’s vs left handed pitching. Josh Donaldson in particular had an absurdly high .428 WoBA against lefties while “only” having a .390 WoBA against right handed pitching. While Donaldson is an elite hitter against both lefties and righties, he is almost superhuman against left handed pitching meaning you should pay up for him when the Jays play a southpaw.
A better example of how using WoBA can improve your scores in Fanduel is looking at one player in particular, Chris Young. Who is Chris Young you might ask? He isn’t a superstar yet last year he won me and a lot of other players a lot of money whenever the Yankees would face a left handed pitcher. You see, Chris Young had a .409(!!!!!!) WoBA vs lefties compared to a putrid .259 WoBA vs right handed pitching. His salary stayed low because of his ineptitude against right handed pitching yet also made him a lock every time he faced a lefty. Assuming that Donaldson’s salary was $4,800 and Chris Young is at around $2,800, you can look at rostering Young vs. a lefty as rostering Donaldson for $2,000 less.
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For a beginner who is trying to figure out good ways to improve on Fanduel and Draftkings scores, these are a couple of ways that anyone can use to make more money. You don’t need any fancy algorithms to take down 50/50’s and increase your bankroll, if you start to incorporate WoBA with the occasional BvP data, your average scores on both sites are bound to increase. Remember, the best way to get better at dfs is to treat it like anything else in life and put the time in to understand the game, by clicking on this article you are taking the first step towards achieving this goal.
Next: DFS Strategy - Take Your Game to the Next Level
My next article will be looking at the key statistics for choosing your starting pitcher in lineups so stay tuned for more from me and Fantasy CPR!