For years, season long baseball leagues dominated the fantasy landscape. You drafted a team in March and rode your studs for a majority of the season in hopes they’d bounce back from a slow start – if they got out to one - and lead you to fantasy baseball glory.
The length of the baseball season allowed you to hold on to your perceived studs since their historical stats always seemed to level out. Making moves to counteract injuries were also a major factor in becoming a fantasy baseball champion.
While season long fantasy baseball is still going strong, a new form of fantasy baseball has taken the world by storm that allows for you to draft a new team every single day and compete for enormous cash prizes while avoiding those annoying injuries to your stud players.
All DFS sites have different setups in terms of salary cap, positions, types of contests, and scoring. While I won’t go into great detail about that, I will be digging into some basic MLB DFS strategy that can help you get in the money more times than not.
Advanced metrics aside, when you boil it all down, baseball is all about hitting and pitching the ball successfully. So in essence, when compiling a daily roster, you want to target hitters that routinely put the ball in play and pitchers that routinely disallow that from happening.
It also helps if the same players can also assist in the runs scored, steals, and home run departments. Pitchers that make quality starts and go deep into the late innings help as well.
Miguel Cabrera - 19.8%, Paul Goldschmidt - 23.9%, Bryce Harper - 25.6%, Dee Gordon - 16.6%, and Prince Fielder -12.7% currently have the top 5 batting averages in all of baseball. The league average strikeout rate is right around 20%, of which Cabrera, Gordon, and Fielder all check in below as noted above. Goldy and Harper rank out higher, but make up for it with their ability to hit the long ball.
While these are all fantastic players to draft to DFS rosters, they’re all going to cost you a pretty penny and eat into your salary cap leaving you very little else to work with.
In cash games where the top half of a contest is all paid the exact same amount, these five players would be wonderful additions to any lineup with their ability to get on base and not cost you points due to striking out.
However, it’s very rare that you’ll see a Guaranteed Prize Pool – or GPP – won with a roster littered with All-Stars. DFS sites wouldn’t be throwing around millions of dollars if it were that easy.
In order to win those, you need to find players that don’t cost much to draft but have the low strikeout rate and ability to get on base and hit for some power. The diamonds in the rough so to speak. Add them to some top of the line studs, and you got yourself quite the recipe to win a life changing contest.
An example of one of those “DITR” this season is the Astros’ Luis Valbuena who has a 24.8% strikeout rate, but has exhibited some major power with 19 HR. He’s found himself on a number of winning GPP rosters this season.
Besides contact rate, some other quantifiers to pay attention to when putting together your roster’s offense are ballpark handedness, batter versus pitcher stats, as well as walks and steals.
You often hear that Coors Field is a hitter’s paradise, and that’s 100 percent accurate with it either ranked No. 1 or No. 2 for left and right-handed bats. Nolan Arenado and most recently Carlos Gonzalez aren’t having big seasons for nothing!
But other ball parks play out better overall for either lefties or righties, so when compiling a lineup, be sure to look at how that batter fared against the pitcher in the past, and then make sure the ballpark the game’s being played in plays to his power.
Zack Greinke – 1.41, Jacob deGrom – 2.09, Scott Kazmir – 2.10, Sonny Gray – 2.12, and Max Scherzer – 2.33 possess the Top 5 ERA’s in all of baseball. That means they’re extremely tough to score on and very expensive when it comes to rostering in daily fantasy leagues.
These players are more beneficial to roster in cash games like the Top 5 hitters listed up above, but could also be worth rostering in GPPs provided the matchup is juicy. Say for example Mad Max is lined up to face a team that strikes out a ton in a pitcher’s venue like say Nationals Park, he’s a no brainer to roster regardless of the type of contest you’re entering that lineup into.
Try to stay away from divisional games where a pitcher is running up against an opponent that’s seen his stuff a number of times. A good example of this would be Gerrit Cole. The Pirates’ ace has been dominant for the most part this season evidenced by his 14-5 record and 2.29 ERA, but in three starts against the Reds this season, he’s 0-3 and has given up 23 hits through just 14.2 innings of work.
Those that ponied up a good amount of their salary cap to roster him in those starts were left with nothing but a losing entry.
On the flipside, look for lesser known pitchers with good stuff going against an opponent that’s never seen him before. These types of players prove to be very valuable sometimes paying out 3-5 times their salary.
A “DITR” pitcher this season has no doubt been Lance McCullers who has allowed just 58 hits and racked up an impressive 78:27 K/BB ratio since getting the call from the minors back in mid-May. While his salary has been on the rise, it’s still very manageable at a number of DFS sites. Be it cash games or GPPs, McCullers has been money!
So there you have it folks. A couple things to help you get acquainted with DFS baseball. Take my advice and you’ll be sure to see your DFS results improve over time.
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