My Research Process (A How To)

For the past month and hopeful far future, I've been writing a daily baseball article directed towards DFS on Draftkings and Fanduel. In this article I'll highlight my research process and how how I come to the conclusions that I do. Hopefully this article helps you better understanding some baseball metrics and how they can be unitized to make predictions.

The Tools

One of the biggest parts of DFS is projections, this is when companies run simulations and come up with median projections for every player on the slate. These are used for finding the best values on the slate, and projections heavily influence ownership as well. There are many sites that offer player projections, and it is often worth comparing multiple if there are outliers or unusual projections. I use Rototwire primarily, but there are also good free options like numberFire and Daily Fantasy Fuel that I use as well. (PS, the underlined words have links)

Then there are the statistics websites, ESPN and CBS have good interfaces and can give the simple stats and splits, but for more advanced stats Fangraphs is where it's at. On Fangraphs you can sort by so many categories and rank every team in different stats. They also have a page where they only show the stats of pitchers playing on that day, which is extremely helpful. Then, if you are getting really deep, Baseball Savant shows how well players do against specific pitch types, and how often pitchers use different pitches. It's usually too much information for DFS, but on super small slates it is a good way to get an edge.

Then there are a lot of other websites I use for smaller tasks. Rotogrinders has a great baseball weather forecast, as does Rotowire. For ownership projections I use fantasyteamadvice, it's free and I've found it to be better than Rotowire's despite theirs being a premium feature. For team run totals I use Fantasylabs, and for and for player odds I use Scoresandodds. Statmuse is also a great tool to answer any specific stat related questions.

The Process

Finding Good Pitchers

When identifying good fantasy pitchers there are a number of stats to look at, ERA and WHIP are the simple ones, but they often don't tell the full story. In case you don't know anything about baseball statistics, ERA is earned run average, it tells you how many runs a pitcher allows per nine innings, disregarding runs that were scored because of fielding errors. The MLB average is 3.9 this year, and the lower the number the better of course. WHIP stands for walks plus hits per inning pitched, and it's exactly what it stands for. The lower the better for the pitcher, the league average is around 1.3, and anything around 1 or bellow is great. These stats are often the most in depth DFS players will get, but they do not do a good job of telling the full story.

An issue with ERA, is that is does not consider the level of the defense behind a pitcher, and FIP and xFIP aim to level the playing field by not considering balls in play. FIP stands for Field Independent Pitching, and it excludes hits, ground balls, fly balls, and line drives —it only considers home runs, walks, hit by pitches, and strikeouts. It then uses a mathematical equation with those variables to create a number that predicts what the pitchers ERA should look like with an average defense behind them. xFIP is even better because instead of using home runs it uses a pitchers fly ball rate times the league average home run to fly ball ratio. Often times there will be pitchers who are over preforming because they keep getting bailed out by fly balls on the warning track; xFIP aims to tell you how good a pitcher truly is, removing fly ball/home run luck.

K rate and SIERA are other great stats at determining the skill of a pitcher. K rate is pretty simple, it tells how often a batter strikes out per plate appearance, last season the league average was 22.7%, and you often see elite pitchers around 30%. SIERA on the other hand is the most accurate ERA predictor, and it's the best way to measure a pitchers performance. SIERA does what xFIP does but also considers the quality of balls in play, so a pitcher who forces for ground outs and pop ups will have a better SIERA than a pitcher who gives up fly balls and line drives.

So how do I use this in DFS? Well, the combination of a low SIERA, high K rate, and cheap salary on DFS is what we are looking for. But his is rare so it's more about finding the best value, a pitcher with a high K rate, average SIERA, and low salary on DFS is a great way to give your lineup upside for a low price. Sometimes it's And through a combination of SIERA, K rate, and DFS salary, you can find your favorite pitchers at cost every day.

I check these stats using the Fangraphs probable pitcher page, which shows the stats of every pitcher playing on a specific day.

Matchups

The quality of the pitcher matters a lot, but so does the quality of the batters they have to face. After identifying the best pitchers, you want to check the quality of the offense they face. Strikeout rate and OPS are the two main stats I look at for that. When pitchers play teams with very good OPS's it makes the play a lot more risky, and when a pitcher faces a team with low K rate, is kills a lot of their upside. It is also worth checking how the batters on a team have done against the pitcher you are looking at, if a team is batting .400 vs a pitcher over multiple games, that is likely not a good play.

I check matchups by looking at the Fangraphs team stat rankings. It's also key to sort by "Vs Left" or "Vs Right" depending on the handedness of the pitcher. Some teams are much better vs left handed pitchers, and you wan't to look at their general stats and be misled.

Finding Good Batters and Stacks

The process of finding good hitters and stacks is almost the opposite of finding good pitchers. Instead of looking for thee best pitching stats we look for the worst. Targeting bad pitchers is the best way to score points in MLB DFS, and you can use the same stats I talked about earlier to find who are the bad pitchers (WHIP, SIERA, xFIP). Home runs are worth a lot of fantasy points so targeting hitters vs pitchers who give up a lot of them is a great strategy, I look for pitchers with a HR/9 above 1.2. But it is important to note their home run to fly ball ratio as well, HR/FB ratio is generally out of control of the pitcher, and league average is around 10%. If a pitcher gives up 1.5 HR/9 but also has a HR/FB ratio of 20%, you can expect some home run regression.

Again, the same method I use for pitching matchups I use for batters as well. For example, if the Angels are facing a lefty they suddenly become a good option, they rank 3rd in OPS vs lefties and people will sleep on them because they are so bad at everything else. Once I've found a team that intrigues me, I look at their entire roster vs the handedness of the pitcher they face. This is when I look at wRC+. wRC+ is a kind of all encompassing stat that measures how many runs a player created for their team, and compares it to league average. It stands for weighted runs created plus, and it looks at how good of a job a player does at creating offense and then gives you an easy to read number. A 100 wRC+ is league average, and anything above is that percentage better than league average and vice versa. For example, a hitter with a 142 wRC+ is 42% better than the average player.

Other Tips

Something else I find helpful, is checking the Vegas odds on players to look for value. I am a fan of the player prop 1.5 Hits+Runs+RBIs, it's like of betting on if the player will have a good game or not. When looking for top end batters, you want them to be heavily favored on the over, -140 or better, or the line might even be at 2.5. If you are looking for cheap value players, any player who is favored for over 1.5 Hits+Runs+RBIs is worth taking if they are cheap on DFS.

Conclusion

If you made it to this point I appreciate your time and interest. Hopefully you now have a better understanding of my process and how you can do similar research on your own. If you are not already subscribed, feel free to leave your email in the subscription bar bellow to receive notifications for my free daily articles. Also, you can check out my PrizePicks plays and keep up with any updates to my analysis on my Twitter page, MLB DFS Analysis. Thank you for reading, and I hope you got something out of this.