RotoAcademy Preview: Basic Statistical Analysis
The previous lesson introduced a general overview of using statistical analysis in daily fantasy baseball and how you can apply it to your pitching selections on a nightly basis. In this lesson, I will delve a little deeper into some other advanced metrics and discuss their impact on your pitching selections.
If you want additional information, I would suggest looking around at Fangraphs. This website may feel overwhelming at first (if you have never used it), but there is a plethora of helpful information over there. Without further ado, let’s delve deeper into some other statistics we can use to give ourselves an edge in the daily MLB game.
Quality of Contact Stats
With a lot of these, you are probably wondering if I am just making things up. No, I assure you that I am not. Quality of contact is a real stat, and it lets you know how a pitcher is doing on another level. Quality of contact is broken down into three categories of “soft,” “medium,” and “hard.” This has been tracked since 2002, though the definition and way of calculating it changed in 2010. Why is this relevant? Well, it’s pretty simple. It is not a guarantee that a ball hit hard will go for a hit while a ball hit softly will be turned into an out, but it is more likely that a hard hit ball will fall for a hit than a soft hit ball, in general. If a pitcher allows every ball to be hit hard, he is obviously going to have a worse year than he would if more balls were hit softly.
Editor’s Note: This is one of the many valuable DFS lessons that can be found over at RotoAcademy. Click here to browse through all of our free/premium offerings and improve as a daily fantasy sports player!
The key is not only to compare this to a league-average figure, but to also notice trends in a pitcher’s results both across years and across different starts. If a pitcher starts to allow more hard-hit contact, perhaps he is feeling the effects of aging and is starting to decline. Perhaps he is fighting an injury. Whatever the case may be, this would be bad news for that pitcher’s fantasy outlook.
You may ask what “good” is for these metrics. According to FanGraphs, a pitcher is doing great if he allows 20% hard hit contact or less, 55% medium contact, and 25% soft hit contact or more. A pitcher is doing awful if the hard hit rate is 40% or more while the soft hit rate is 15% or less. Obviously, these ranges fall along a continuum, but this is a nice baseline to start from. The most important thing to notice is trends over time.
PITCHf/x Data
One of the coolest toys to play with in your statistical research is PITCHf/x data. It is not for the uneducated, but the good news is that it isn’t as bad as it looks on the surface. This is best explained via an example. Take a look at the following chart, which is taken from FanGraphs on the PITCHf/x page for Justin Verlander.
This is filtered to show only his fastball, but the “All” tab would contain all of his individual pitches. Take a look at the far right column, which indicates average velocity on that fastball. Notice that he topped 95 MPH on average in 2009, 2010, and 2011. It is certainly no coincidence that those were his three best years in the major leagues. From there, he dipped to a 94.7 MPH average in 2012, 94.0 in 2013, and 93.1 in 2014. Once again, it is certainly no coincidence that he has struggled more since the end of the 2011 season.
This chart also shows you his minimum velocity, maximum velocity, and general stats allowed when he throws a fastball. Again, you can filter for the same analysis for Verlander’s other pitches, too. You can also look at individual game charts, pitch plotting, and other advanced data. It’s easy to get lost in the voluminous information, but you can make this as simple or as complicated as you wish. Do whatever you want to do to make yourself a better player. If that means going all out to absorb this information, go for it. If that means looking at it on a higher level like I just did, go for it. Once again, we are looking for trends over time that may help us better indicate future performance.
Plate Discipline Stats
Another key metric to look at is the various plate discipline stats, specifically how many swinging strikes a pitcher generates. That is a key measure of how effective a pitcher is, especially if they can get their swinging strike percentage into the double digits. The following excerpt from FanGraphs reflects the various plate discipline stats for Clayton Kershaw over his career.
As you can see, Kershaw has increased his swinging strike percentage in every year of his career except for one, which saw a whopping decline of 0.1%. Other than that, he has ascended to dominance more every year. Here you have the stats of a future Hall of Famer. You can see some other metrics in the chart. Note that the “O” abbreviation stands for pitches outside the strike zone, while the “Z” abbreviation stands for pitches inside the strike zone. Keep an eye on the swinging strike rates of various pitchers, as increasing figures here (even DURING a particular season) are great indicators of a pitcher that is throwing the ball well.
SIERA
While ERA and WHIP are becoming things of the past, even metrics like FIP and xFIP are considered outdated by some advanced statistics watchers. The “hip” stat of the future appears to be SIERA. This metric attempts to not only remove the effect of defense, but also the effects of park factors and luck. It does this by estimating ERA via walk rate, strikeout rate, and ground ball rate. Pundits have claimed to prove that SIERA is the most accurate of all ERA estimators, and that is great for us in a DFS sense. Remember, we are trying to predict future performance, not just evaluate past performance. Keep an eye on the SIERA of any pitcher you are looking to roster in DFS. If you notice that a pitcher has a particularly low price tag because he has a high ERA or has been getting unlucky of late, feel free to pounce if his SIERA indicates improvement on his current earned run average. The actual mechanics of this stat are complicated, so I won’t delve too deep into that here.
Miscellaneous Items
Now, although I have hit on most of the fancy metrics in this article, there are plenty of other things you can look at, such as:
• Strikeout rate, walk rate, and strikeout-to-walk ratio
• Pitch movement statistics and comparisons over time
• Batting average on balls in play (a possible sign of bad luck)
• Spray charts
• Ground ball rate, fly ball rate, and ground ball to fly ball rate
• Pull %, Center %, and Opposite Field %
• Individual pitch data
• Pitch grades
This is only a sampling of the detail that you can find. You can pull up almost anything you want to on a particular pitcher. Get used to the things that you like to look at in your possible DFS pitching options and adapt your strategy as appropriate.
In Starting Pitcher Selection, you’ll learn:
• How different daily fantasy sites value pitchers
• Which basic pitching stats are outdated and which are still useful
• How to interpret the important advanced pitching stats
• How to use the RotoGrinders MLB tools
• How to put all the pitching information together on a daily basis to profit in MLB DFS
To read the rest of ‘Starting Pitcher Selection’, you must purchase the course!
