Pre-Musings - CheeseIsGood's 2020 Daily Fantasy Baseball Prep: Part 1
It’s about that time! Happy Spring, everyone. I hope you’re ready for some daily fantasy baseball.
With the season a few weeks away, I wanted to get things rolling with a series of Pre-Musings, in which we’ll talk through getting prepared for the 2020 MLB season. Of course, the term Pre-Musings immediately makes me think of George Carlin and the old “What does it mean to pre-board? Do you get on before you get on?”
Less than one paragraph into the year and I’m already digressing into stand-up comedy. I am in mid-season form.
There are going to be some small changes to the Million Dollar Musings as part of our DFS premium content package this season. For the most part, it will be what we’ve been doing the past several seasons with a stats-based deep dive into each day’s MLB slate. However, I’m going to be spending a lot more time talking about strategy and lineup construction this year, and a little less time going team by team breaking down every individual matchup. The DFS tools that we have on the site now, from PlateIQ to LineupHQ, do such a great job of sorting out the numbers that I want to be sure I’m giving you something useful every day.
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Essentially what that is going to look like is a similar pitcher breakdown to past years, where I’ll be grouping the pitchers into tiers, and talking through who I’m playing in cash games and tournaments on different sites. The bigger change is going to be in the hitting department, where I’m planning to start out the day with a shorter Cliff Notes section (we all love the Cliff Notes, or CliffS Notes, for those of you who need that extra S) and some player and stack rankings. And then I’m going come back a little later into the day after I’ve had time to build some lineups to talk about different strategies I’m seeing on that slate.
This is all subject to change, and every day might be a little bit different, but the basis of everything I write in the Musings is to help you gain a deeper understanding of baseball analysis and ways you can use this in your DFS lineup construction. I am not here to tell you WHO to play, and really not even HOW to play. There are a lot of ways to skin a cat, and we do not all need to have the same idea of how to get there. The variance in baseball is unlike any other sport and there is almost never a must-play or a can’t miss in the way we might see in a sport like NBA. We’ll dig into the differences more in the coming weeks, but please always remember that we all play this game a little differently, and your opinion and strategy does not need to align with mine. I just want to be able to show you why I’m playing the lineups I’m playing, and help you get better at your own style of play, even if it’s different than mine. In this Pre-Musings series, I’ll walk through all the stats I’ll be talking about through the season, and why and how I use them. That way, when the season starts, we can jump in headfirst. Or maybe dive in feet first, but somehow we’ll get into the pool. It’s all about the pool.
For this first installment, I want to touch on three big picture points that will be making things tricky this season. We have the Houston Astros sign stealing fiasco, the rule changes in MLB and the unknown surrounding which version of the actual baseball will show up this year.
1) Houston, You Have A Problem
I will spare you my personal feelings about the Astros situation. We all have an opinion, and we should all save that for the people who care. What matters to us now is what is going to happen on the field with the Astros this year, and whether or not we change our analysis of these players for DFS purposes.
The first thing I want to highlight is that the Astros were not good because of the sign stealing. We still don’t know exactly who was using what and how often, but there is no evidence that these players were significantly better because of the sign stealing. This is a team full of great hitters, and they were great hitters even without knowing what pitch was coming. The league average team has a K rate about 1% higher on the road, there is just nothing unusual about any of these numbers. Here are the full Astros team home vs road numbers the past three seasons.
2017 Home – 16.7% K, 7.7% BB, .344 wOBA
2017 Road – 17.9% K, 8.5% BB, .353 wOBA (lowest road K% in MLB)
2018 Home – 19.2% K, 9.9% BB, .318 wOBA
2018 Road – 19.7% K, 8.6% BB, .334 wOBA (2nd lowest road K%)
2019 Home – 18.5% K, 10.2% BB, .366 wOBA
2019 Road – 18.0% K, 10.0% BB, .344 wOBA (lowest road K%)
This Astros team is consistently the best in the league in contact even on the road, where the garbage cans just quietly hold the garbage like they are supposed to.
Some players on the team had better road numbers than home numbers and any way you slice it, this is just a great team with a lot of great hitters, dirty cheaters or not. So, before factoring in mental aspects and retaliation, just from a baseball perspective, I personally have no concern whatsoever about the skills of these players dropping off. For example, look at this eye-opening stat line:
Alex Bregman 2019 Home – 12.8% K, 15.7% BB, .387 wOBA, .246 ISO
Alex Bregman 2019 Away – 11.3% K, 18.8% BB, .450 wOBA, .348 ISO
The dude can hit anywhere. Another example of the lack of relevance of the sign stealing would be Michael Brantley. In 2018, Brantley played for the Indians, and had a 9.5% strikeout rate. In 2019 as a member of the Astros, his strikeout rate at home was 10.4%. The guy is just good at hitting baseballs.
Now, it’s not just as simple as strikeouts and walks, and when looking in depth at every possible batted ball angle from 2017 when the sign stealing likely began, sure maybe it helped a little on certain types of pitches at home. But, again, the main point here for me is that the skills of these hitters are what they are (they are who we thought they were?), and they are good.
The bigger issue is whether or not we can expect some of these Astros hitters to falter this season due to the extreme pressure they are going to be taking from all sides. They are going to see a lot of very hostile environments and facing more scrutiny than players are used to. There is no way to quantify this, as some players may thrive under that pressure, others may falter, but even more likely, we are never going to know one way or the other. When George Springer goes hitless for five days in a row, some people are going to say, see he can’t handle the pressure. But, will that be true, or is it just simply a slump like every player goes through? I think this is a much tougher issue in season long leagues than in DFS. Even if this team as a whole is more up and down this season, it’s the same absolutely loaded lineup full of great hitters. My hunch is that we see a drastic reduction in ownership on Astros batters early in the season, and I for one will be on board if that’s the case.
What about the potential for the Houston batters getting thrown at and potentially hit-by-pitch injury risks? This is also much more an issue for season long leagues where an injury would hurt you. In DFS, if a guy is in the lineup, he’s in the lineup. It would be absurd in my view to try and calculate a downgrade for one game on the potential of maybe getting thrown at. For me personally, this is a complete non-factor.
We will be discussing this early and often this season as the games begin, but just know that from my perspective to begin the season, I am not downgrading Houston batters. I may be actively rooting against the scumbags, but again, no need to discuss our opinions!
2) MLB Rule Changes
There are a few new rules in the league this year, but none are likely to have a huge impact on DFS. The one that is the most relevant to us would be the three-batter minimum, but let’s take a quick look at the other changes first.
Active Roster Limits – Rosters increase to 26 (from 25) with a maximum of 13 pitchers. This is not a DFS relevant issue, although part 2 of the roster rules will make September a little more tolerable, with September roster expansion expanding to just 28 players, instead of the goofy 40 players of previous seasons.
Injured List Change – Pitchers have to miss 15 days, instead of 10. This is also a non-factor for DFS.
Two-Way Players – MLB is allowing players (like Shohei Ohtani) to be listed as both pitchers and hitters. The only way this matters for DFS is that position players will not be allowed to pitch in games unless the run differential is seven runs or more, or into extra innings. Most of the time that we saw position players pitching last season were in blowouts anyway, and would still be allowed under these rules, but at least potentially it could keep a few non-pitchers off the mound which lead to nonsensical nonsense in the hours after I have gone to sleep.
Three-Batter Minimum – This is the one that really changes the game. This is a bigger deal for real life baseball and managing, but could have some effect in DFS. Pitchers will be required to either face a minimum of three batters, or to pitch until the end of an inning. The main thing this changes is that relievers cannot be brought in to face one batter (unless it’s the 3rd out after replacing a starter or multi-inning reliever) and then be taken out. This also means that when we see an opener, they do have to pitch at least one full inning, though that is almost always the case already anyway. In season long leagues, this could potentially change the value of some relief pitchers, but in DFS, we are concerned only with the effect this could have on either our starting pitchers or offenses. Theoretically, this could give the occasional starter an extra couple outs, although I don’t see that happening enough to factor into our analysis. Because a reliever only has to finish an inning, a starter can still be replaced mid-inning as usual.
The bigger effect is that the one-batter specialist relievers, usually lefties, will no longer be able to come in and face just one hitter. While it will be tough to quantify the percentage chance, this does give a slight leg up to those left-handed batters with heavy platoon splits who typically get pinch hit for when a lefty is brought in. For example, we all remember the Joc Pederson games from last year when he was a screaming must-play value leading off against a right-handed pitcher. But he almost never saw a full game with opposing teams brining in lefty relievers to get him out. With players like this, if they are followed in the order by right-handed bats, there is some hope to get an extra at bat this season, which would of course be a boost to their fantasy value.
Quite honestly, until we see how this really plays out, I think it’s a mistake to put more than very minimal value into this, and only with a specific few players, but we’ll be keeping tabs on this as the season wears on.
3) These Balls, Those Balls or The Other Balls?
Of all the big picture issues heading into the season, this is the one that will clearly have the biggest and most crucial impact on DFS. Major League Baseball has never been very forthcoming about the process (if there even is one) of deciding which baseballs they will be using. As we discussed in depth here last year, the league has changed the ball itself, and the 2019 regular season saw the by far the highest home run rate on record. Of course the statcast launch angle revolution and the approach of the players themselves have played into the game’s power surge, but it has been proven that the actual baseballs have become more aerodynamic. I am not a scientist, as I missed that particular day of school, and if you want to learn more about the inner workings of what makes the balls fly a little further each year, you can go down a never-ending rabbit hole on the interwebs. But, here’s what the end result looks like:
MLB HR/FB%:
2014 – 9.5%
2015 – 11.4%
2016 – 12.8%
2017 – 13.7%
2018 – 12.7%
2019 – 15.3%
Studies have been done that show the ball was first changed prior to the 2015 season, so that jump from 2014 to 2015 was not random. We have also since learned that the ball used in 2018 was tempered back down, and the slight decrease in HR/FB% there was also not random. However, the real issue here is that MLB is not willing (or able) to tell us what to expect next. Making matters worse again, the balls appear to have been changed back to an older version in the 2019 playoffs. It was not just colder weather and better pitching; an in-depth study at Baseball Prospectus showed that the postseason balls were in fact different.
Because of the lack of transparency from MLB, we don’t know to what extent this is all intentionally mandated, but clearly, someone somewhere has the ability to affect the game drastically based on the manufacturing of the baseballs.
The bad news is that we are just not going to know what we’re getting until we get a few weeks into the season. But the good news is that for DFS, we’ll be able to adjust our baselines and expectations as we figure out which version of the baseball is being used in 2020.
The biggest obvious differences in the juiced ball is that with more home runs being hit, DFS scores are higher, more players have more upside on a daily basis, and pitchers are seeing their ERAs go up, making for lower floors for everyone.
To open the season, I am not going to attempt to just randomly guess what the baseball is going to do. If you’ve been reading my musings for a while, you know that I focus on the underlying skills of players, and not on the surface results. We’ll dive into these skills in the coming weeks, but what this does is allows us to see the quality and type of contact that a batter makes, and that quality of contact is the same regardless of which baseball we’re using.
We will also continue to focus on the underlying skills of the pitchers as well. If a pitcher is piling up strikeouts, limiting walks, or inducing soft ground balls or infield pop ups, well then whoop-dee-doo on which version of the ball he’s throwing.
By a few weeks into the season, we’ll be able to see studies showing if the balls have changed again, and in what direction. The main adjustment will be in HR/FB%. As we’ll discuss next week, if we look simply at a fly ball rate, hard hit rate and contact rate, those numbers are what they are, and we can change our expectation for HR/FB% if needed. None of this will change which players are the best hitters or pitchers, but it could change the way we allocate our salary cap in 2020.
In the simplest terms, if the ball is juiced as it was in 2019, we’re going to continue chasing power and fly balls, and finding it in all price ranges with all types of players. Those HR/FB% we looked at make a huge difference in the overall player pool. In 2018, 27 major league players hit 30 or more home runs. In 2019, that number jumped to 58. That caused the average ERA to shoot up from 4.15 in 2018 to 4.51 in 2019. In DFS terms, that is simply putting more points into play for batters, and taking points away from pitchers.
However, and this is where we will continue to fight with each other this year, that does not mean that we are simply supposed to ignore expensive pitching and load up on batters in DFS. What it does is make strikeouts the most valuable commodity for pitchers, as that is the only place we can get expect to get consistent scoring from our pitchers. If all pitchers are giving up more runs, then yes, all pitchers’ scoring goes down, but the gap between good and bad pitchers does not get narrowed, and in many cases actually gets bigger. Plus, if there are more home run hitters, then that means we don’t have to roster the most expensive bats on any slate because we can find home runs everywhere.
This is the puzzle in putting together DFS lineups, and the reason I love it so much. We will be talking through each day’s slate and breaking down the various options for building lineups. And, as I will continue to harp on, there is more than one way to play DFS, and my goal here is not to tell you who to play, or even how to play. The goal is to give you a better understanding of the research and analysis that goes into MLB DFS.
With that, I will conclude this first installment of the Pre-Musings and get to work on walking through the stats you can expect to see me talking about this season. If there are any topics you’d like to see me cover, please feel free to post a comment here or let me know on twitter. I’ll get on that as soon as I finish this ice cream.
Pre-Musings Part 1
Pre-Musings Part 2
Pre-Musings Part 3
Pre-Musings Part 4