Don't Be A Dice-K
April 5, 2007. We’d been looking forward to it for months. We figured it just might end up being a historic date in Major League Baseball history. It was Daisuke (“Dice-K”) Matsuzaka’s first start in the United States of America.
A buddy and I made the trip to Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City. I wore a Red Sox jersey; he wore a shirt that bore Dice-K’s name in Japanese. The stadium was packed with Japanese fans. Several of them stopped my buddy to take pictures with him in the shirt that bore their hero’s name. The electric atmosphere in the stadium felt almost like a playoff game. I called my dad and told him: “It’s awesome, because Dice-K could end up being one of the best pitchers in baseball history, and we’re getting to see his first start in person.”
Seven innings, 108 pitches, 10 strikeouts, and one earned run later, it seemed that we had witnessed “the start” of something special.
Ask most Red Sox fans, and they’d probably tell you that start was pretty much the end of something special as well…
A look at Dice-K’s numbers reveal he was not as big of a bust as I (in my Red Sox-warped mind) remember him being. In fact, through the first three months of the season, he was a perfectly respectable pitcher: 3.54 SIERA, 25.1% strikeout rate, and – perhaps most importantly of all – a walk rate of 7.8%. It was after the Fourth of July in his first year in the States that things began to crumble. From that point forward in his rookie season, Dice-K’s SIERA rose to 4.49, his strikeout rate fell to 20.6%, and his walk rate grew to 10.8%. After those first three months of Dice-K’s career, it would be years before we would see his walk rate dip below double-digits once more:
2008 walk rate: 13.1%
2009 walk rate: 10.6%
2010 walk rate: 11.1%
2011 walk rate: 13.8%
If all you did was look at the numbers, you would assume this guy had very little control over his pitches. But if you were unfortunate enough to have watched some of Dice-K’s starts during these years (which, sadly, constituted his “prime”), you know this was not actually the case.
You see, this was the maddening thing about Dice-K. The Red Sox coaches talked to him about it. The Red Sox front office talked to him about it. The Red Sox catchers talked to him about it. And yet, he refused to listen. Every batter, it seemed, was a 3-2 count. Every couple innings, it seemed, Dice-K loaded the bases. Sometimes, he even walked in a run. And eventually, he would work out of the jam with minimal damage allowed due to a timely strikeout. Almost every time, this strikeout would come from the batter chasing strike three out of the zone.
Dice-K, to put it simply, refused to give into any hitter. Most of the strikes he threw were either barely on the black or were swings-and-misses out of the zone. Most of the balls he threw were either barely off the black or were pitches intended to get swings-and-misses out of the zone. He nibbled, nibbled, nibbled – all game long – always content to barely walk a guy if he had to, and to start all over again with the next batter; always believing it didn’t matter if he put runners on base, as he could eventually strike out enough guys to work out of trouble.
For a little while, honestly, this plan worked all right. In 2007, he had a 73.9% left on base (LOB) percentage (league average – what all pitchers can be expected to regress to – is around 70%). In 2008, he had an incredible 80.6% LOB%, and in 2009 he repeated this magic one final time, notching a 75.8% LOB%.
But the Red Sox knew this couldn’t last forever (or, heck, maybe they were just sick of him pitching only five innings every freaking start), and they told him to be aggressive. They instructed him to attack hitters. They implored him to trust his stuff and come after guys and put them in a hole. Essentially, they let him know it was okay to allow contact, that it was better to be aggressive and allow a few hits than to nibble, nibble, nibble – nibbling to a point where he seemed to always either barely walk guys or barely strike guys out.
But Dice-K didn’t listen. And when his LOB% dropped to 67.2% in 2010, then to 63.5% in 2011, then all the way down to 57.9% in 2012, the warning signs his SIERA had been sharing for years began to finally turn into his reality. He did not go down as one of the greatest pitchers in Major League Baseball history. He did not go down as one of the greatest pitchers in Red Sox history. I’m not quite sure what he even goes down as – I guess a severely overpaid and overhyped pitcher who provided decent back-of-the-rotation production for a handful of years. A couple decades from now, only hardcore baseball fans will even know who Dice-K Matsuzaka was. And really – at least for those first few years – it was not because he didn’t have great stuff. Instead, it was only because he refused to be aggressive, refused to attack hitters, and instead decided to nibble.
Now, most of you who have followed along with my writing on RotoGrinders know that I started playing Daily Fantasy Sports last year, but that my focus during my first full year (through all of MLB and all of NFL) was entirely on tournaments. It was not until this year – a bit during NBA, and more fully during MLB – that I began to focus on cash games.
Because of this, I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the best cash game player. I’m not a bad cash game player – heck, I possess too much knowledge of Major League Baseball, advanced stats, matchups, and the ways in which things work together, to be a bad cash game player – but as far as the nuances of roster construction and the daily grind, I’m still more advanced in my knowledge and ability in GPP play than I am in my knowledge and ability to consistently crush cash games. I’m learning, and I’m growing each day, and each day I become a better player than I was the day before. But I am certainly not yet to the place I am capable of reaching.
The other day, however, I realized something interesting: I realized that every day I played only cash games (or only cash games with some cheap GPP entries), I either barely cashed in double-ups or barely failed to cash in double-ups.
On the other hand: I’ve been playing the Gold Glove (the $1060 tourney on DraftKings) off and on for the last couple months (ever since I went on a nice little two week run in that tourney that boosted my playable bankroll enough to justify taking sporadic shots). And I discovered that although I had cashed some days and not cashed some other days in the Gold Glove, I had managed to cash in double-ups 14 consecutive times when using my Gold Glove team in cash games.
Fourteen consecutive times!
And it hit me: Whenever I built a team with the intention of “beating half the field,” I had a tendency to play things very safe, and to take fewer risks, and to – essentially – build an entire team that was the equivalent of nibbling, nibbling, nibbling. These teams led to me either barely cashing or barely failing to cash – in the same way Dice-K used to nibble, nibble, nibble, and end up either barely walking a guy or barely striking him out.
Whenever I built a team for the Gold Glove, however – building a team, that is, with the intention of finishing in first place against many of the best MLB DFS players (as opposed to building a team “with the intention of beating half the field”) – I became more aggressive. I took more risks. I was like a pitcher attacking the zone – a guy who knows his pitches might get hit, but who also knows that if his pitches don’t get hit, he’ll have the hitter in a quick hole with a huge advantage working in his favor. Instead of nibbling, I “trusted my stuff.” And here’s the funny thing about taking more risks in MLB DFS: with more risk, you generally gain more upside as well. And because of this, you may have a few guys who do poorly…but the other guys on your roster are going to have a great chance of making up for these poor performances with big games of their own.
I’ll be honest and tell you this is still something I am trying to figure out myself. I am too analytical – am too much of a cerebral individual – to be able to trick myself into thinking I’m building a team for the Gold Glove when I know full well I do not plan to play the Gold Glove that day. And I have not been able to achieve the same effect by playing satellites or cheap GPPs. I’m bummed that we’re down to two and half months of baseball remaining, as I feel I’m close to figuring this out, and I would love to figure it out in time for it to make a major difference (to where I don’t have to dip into the Gold Glove just to build a great cash game team!). But while I may not yet have the answer to this conundrum, what I do know is this:
My teams are always better when I am aggressive with them. I can look back through my history throughout the entire season and see this idea bear itself out over and over again. All season long, when I’ve played cash games with the team I’m using in important tourneys, I perform much better than when I’ve played cash games with a team I built with the intention of “beating half the field.”
As we enter the All Star Break, each of us is provided with a perfect opportunity to think about the areas in which we are doing well and the areas in which we could stand to improve. Each of us has an opportunity to figure out how we can take what we do well in MLB DFS and enhance these elements, and how we can take what we do poorly in MLB DFS and improve.
While each of us will have our own strengths and weaknesses – our own positives we need to enhance, and our own mistakes we need to eliminate – I want to specifically encourage you to ask yourself if you are too timid in your roster construction approach.
Do you build teams with the intention of “not losing,” instead of building teams with the intention of winning? Do you play things too safe? Do you find yourself failing to be aggressive? Have you been too much like Dice-K – nibbling, nibbling, nibbling?
It’s time to start being aggressive. It’s time to “play to win” instead of “playing to not lose.” It’s time to attack the zone, throw strikes, and get ahead of hitters. Sure, some of your pitches might get hit – some of your teams might perform horribly – but as you begin to be more aggressive, you’ll realize that your good teams are far better than they were before, and you’ll find that you have these “good teams” far more often than you did before. Through all this, you’ll find that you are enjoying a lot more success than you ever could have hoped to enjoy while nibbling, nibbling, nibbling.
Listen: Don’t be a Dice-K!
Instead, be aggressive. Play to win rather than playing “not to lose.” Build teams with the intention of crushing everyone at once, instead of building teams with the intention of “beating half the field.”
Dice-K wasn’t fun to watch, anyway. There’s really no reason to carry him in your pocket as you build your teams each day!