Million Dollar Musings: Monday, April 29th

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2019-04-29 20:44:12 Premium Content Part of the product SimLabs+

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Monday, April 29th

Happy Monday! I enjoyed going on a tangent last Monday with the look into the power surge, so I’m going to take another little tangent to start today’s Musings as well. I’m going to introduce you to our new segment, and then will be back shortly with analysis of tonight’s nine-game slate.

Deep Thoughts With Cheese

If you didn’t watch Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s, you missed out on some truly incredible humor. One of the gems was the ‘Deep Thoughts’ by Jack Handey segments. They were just completely random nonsensical musings tossed into the show, not unlike a lot of the nonsense I throw out around these parts. Just a few examples:

“To me, boxing is like ballet, except there’s no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.”

“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”

“The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.”

OK, you get the idea. Doesn’t this seem like just the kind of thing I would love? Well, it is! So, anyhow, I thought I thought I would introduce a new little addition to the Musings, Deep Thoughts With Cheese. However, these will not be my goofy random thoughts, since you get those already interspersed into the Musings. These will be random, but hopefully relevant thoughts about MLB and DFS trends and strategies that I want to share. I get so involved in breaking down the slates, that sometimes I forget to talk about the big picture issues that affect each and every slate we play.

Today I want to touch on something that I get a lot of questions about this time of year. When can we switch to just using 2019 stats? I have to channel my inner Derek Carty here and tell you that the truth is it takes WAY more sample size than you want it to before we can trust 2019 numbers. This is especially true when talking about hitting splits and batted balls.

The first thing to stabilize within a season is strikeouts and walks. This is part of the reason I focus so much on them in my research. Everything that happens after a ball is hit has a lot of variance involved, but strikeouts and walks are what they are. There is not an absolute correct answer on a lot of the metrics, but generally speaking, according to a study on fangraphs, strikeout rate begins to stabilize after 60 PA for hitters and 70 batters faced for pitchers. Walks around 120 PA and 170 batters faced.

The next thing to stabilize are ground ball and fly ball rates, which are in the area of 80 balls in play.