Identifying Winning Relief Pitchers for DraftKings MLB Showdown Contests

Recently, I looked through the 85-plus single-game DraftKings Showdown slates and found some stack combinations that were used at a much higher rate by winning entries than the entire field.

The biggest usage disparity was between the Pitcher 1/3, Hitter 2 stack (i.e. one pitcher for one team, two from the other, and two hitters from one team). This stack accounted for 14.2% of winning lineups, while it was only found in 2% of entries overall.

Clearly using a four-pitcher stack, with THREE on one team, is contrarian. And it’s also the type of contrarian play that actually ends up being one of the best for upside.

Even knowing which stack we should use, we still don’t know the details of which players we should slot into the stack to maximize our chance of winning. In this article, I’m going to look into the characteristics of pitchers and hitter in this stack found in previous winning lineups.

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About the Author

colekev
Kevin Cole (colekev)

Kevin Cole previously worked on Wall Street as an equity and credit analyst before transitioning to data-related sports analysis. For a number of years, Kevin has specialized in creating predictive sports models that includes published work at Pro Football Focus, Rotoworld, numberFire, and RotoViz. He is now the Director of Data and Analytics at RotoGrinders.