Million Dollar Musings: Monday, April 22nd

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2019-04-22 19:39:59 Premium Content Part of the product Core4

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Monday, April 22nd

I’m going to do something different today. I will get to the daily breakdown of the slate, and give you my thoughts on tonight’s matchups, but I want to be sure to continue to focus on the main purpose of this article. That is not to tell you who to play on any given day. The purpose of the article is to help you understand the data, the research and the thought process behind MLB DFS. If you spend the time to read this article every day this season, not only will you get access to some high-level punnery, but you will understand the in-and-outs of how I break down this sport. Each day, as I’m talking through the K% of this guy or the HR/FB% of that guy, it is not so that you know Player A has a good matchup today. You can find that anywhere. It is so that you understand WHY Player A has a good matchup today. With the inherent variance in the sport, the best matchups will not always work out in a 4-5 AB sample size, but you’ll know why you’re playing the players you’re playing.

Today, I want to go bigger picture and talk about what I think may be happening in the sport as a whole that will affect everything we do all season.

It is very early in the season to make any definitive judgments about trends, but from what I’m seeing so far, it looks to me like we are back to the 2017 juiced ball era in major league baseball. If you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about here, there have been a lot of studies done on slight changes to the balls used in the majors starting in late 2015, which coincided with an unmistakable surge in power that saw the league HR/FB% jump significantly starting in 2015 and continuing through 2017.

I am not going to get into the science of how baseballs are manufactured here, you could spend hours going down the rabbit hole of reading articles into what was found when the balls were x-rayed, how it affected the drag and loads of other scientific terms that would take longer for me to try and understand and explain than it would take for Albert Pujols to run from first to third.