RotoAcademy Preview: Key Differences Between MLB and Other Sports
You know that one sibling or cousin that is just a little different from everyone else in your family? Like they were the mailman’s baby or something? That’s what the MLB is like compared to the other daily fantasy sports. There is nothing wrong with it; it’s just different. Daily fantasy baseball can be the best sport in all of DFS; it can also be the most tilting. You have to get used to the major swings that comes from a game that is built around failure.
Baseball is a completely different animal than football or basketball, because someone that succeeds one-third of the time (.333 batting average) can be considered a Hall of Famer. The focus of this lesson is to point out the key differences of daily fantasy baseball compared to other sports and how those differences should impact your decision-making.
In my opinion, the biggest adjustment is trying to get out of the “value” mindset that we often have with other sports. Daily fantasy basketball is such a price-sensitive sport, that anyone can become a strong play if they are cheap enough and given enough minutes. There is a linear relationship between minutes and fantasy production in the NBA. While value isn’t quite as important in the NFL, it still is a major component of lineup building. When a star running back gets hurt and his backup is in line to draw the start, he will offer pretty decent value even if the matchup doesn’t look great on paper.
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!
Basically, opportunity leads to fantasy production in both basketball and football. When we pay up for a superstar in the NBA (Russell Westbrook) or the NFL (Julio Jones), we can expect them to produce at a fairly high level. Even if Westbrook has a bad game, he is still going to score what, maybe 30 fantasy points? In baseball, you can throw out the idea of guaranteed production. You can spend up on the best hitters in the very best matchups and still walk away with zero fantasy points. Try wrapping your head around LeBron James playing 35 minutes and scoring zero fantasy points. That’s just not going to happen. However, it happens all the time in baseball. The craziest part is that having a hitter or two that scores zero fantasy points doesn’t completely kill your lineup.
The concept of needing a certain amount of production from a player doesn’t really apply to baseball because since players have such a limited sample size each night, their production is going to differ drastically each night. A hitter that bats .333 and gets three at-bats should, in theory, produce a hit. But when there is a 67% chance that he won’t get a hit each time he gets up to the plate, the chances of him going hitless are very good.
In basketball or football, a spot start can be a great source of value because, once again, opportunity leads directly to fantasy production. At-bats do not equal fantasy production in baseball. That’s not to say that a player making a spot start can’t play well, but we are much more concerned with the pitching matchup, team total, and batting order. The fact that he is in the lineup does not make him a good value play by itself.
Since we are more concerned with matchups, baseball is not as price-sensitive of a sport as basketball or football. I don’t mind overpaying for a pitcher in a great spot or paying a premium for a hitter, even though he is not technically the best play in projected-points-per-dollar sense.
Sample size is a major issue in baseball, which is why we should expect big swings in fantasy production on a nightly basis. In basketball, a player can score fantasy points five different ways – points, rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals. There are close to 100 possessions in every basketball game, which means each player has a ton of possessions to rack up fantasy points. In the NFL, a quarterback will typically throw the ball 40 times, a running back will see 20 touches, and the best receivers will see at least 10 targets per game. In baseball, hitters will generally see three to five plate appearances per game and ALL of their fantasy production hinges on those at-bats. A small sample combined with the small percentage of success for each plate appearance leads to volatility and a LOT of it.
Volatility is not a word that I love when it comes to cash games in any sport. Generally, we want predictability in cash games. You can do all of the research in the world, target the best possible hitters and the best possible pitchers, and have an awful night. In fact, that WILL happen to you a number of times. That’s just what happens when you are dealing with a sport built around failure. However, if you make the right lineup decisions over the course of the season, the variance will even out and you will be profitable over the long haul.
The final difference that I want to bring up is fantasy correlation. In basketball and football, there is a finite amount of production given the fact that there is a clock. There are only four quarters and barring overtime, it gives us a limited amount of time to rack up fantasy points, For that reason, players on the same team are generally competing with one another for that production. Think of it as a pie. Teammates are forced to divvy up the pie and there is only so much to go around. That’s not to say that you can’t have success playing people from the same team, but generally, the more players that you play on the same team, the less upside your lineup is going to have.
In baseball, the complete opposite is true. The only limit in a baseball game is outs. If a team doesn’t record outs, they will continue batting long into the night. A game can technically go on forever if a team doesn’t record 27 outs. This is a key difference because there is no longer a pie for teammates to have to share when it comes to fantasy production. When a player hits a home run, it has no impact on the potential fantasy production of his teammates. The next hitter has the same opportunity. In baseball, we actually increase our upside by targeting players from the same team because we get fantasy points for runs and RBIs. Hitters from the same team have a highly positive correlation. This is why stacking is such a popular strategy in daily fantasy baseball. If an offense scores 15 runs one night, we are going to want to have as much exposure to that lineup as we possibly can.
While stacking does increase your upside, it also increases your risk. If you stack a team that only scores one run, odds are you are not going to have a very good night of DFS. This is just an important difference to note, because we generally don’t like to stack complete teams in fantasy basketball or football.
So, let’s quickly sum up the main differences between MLB and some of the other sports:
— We can basically throw the term value out the window when it comes to daily fantasy baseball.
— With such small sample sizes when it comes to plate appearances, we should expect more volatility on a nightly basis.
— We need to trust the process more so than in any other sport.
— And finally, correlations are a major part of fantasy baseball.
In Notorious’ Blueprint to Daily Fantasy Baseball, you’ll learn:
• Why daily fantasy baseball is so different from other daily sports
• Why that difference should affect the way you approach it every day
• How to use Vegas lines and totals
• How FanDuel and DraftKings score their fantasy points and how that affects strategy
• What stats to focus on with hitters and pitchers
• Some helpful tips to store and remember when selecting your lineups each day
To read the rest of “Notorious’ Blueprint to Daily Fantasy Baseball,” you must purchase the course!
