Isolated Power: The Home Run Stat
Isolated Power (ISO) is both literally and figuratively the home run stat for daily fantasy baseball. A home run on DraftKings is worth 14 points and one on FanDuel is worth 18 (it was seven last year – they changed their scoring for the 2016 season). If you want to have a chance to take down a big tournament, it is a must that you find guys for your lineup that are in good spots to go yard. Chicks may dig the long ball, but daily fantasy players might dig it even more. On sites that do not penalize you for outs, a guy who goes one-for-five with a home run will yield more fantasy points than a guy who goes two-for-four with a two runs scored and an RBI. One swing of the bat can vault you up in a tournament and help you have a profitable day.
Let’s start the discussion with an explanation of what Isolated Power really measures. Many sabermetricians will tell you that Isolated Power (ISO) measures a player’s raw power. That’s not really the way I like to look at the definition though. A player’s ISO score is calculated by taking his slugging percentage and subtracting his batting average from it. The slugging percentage measures bases per at-bat. The batting average is a measure of his number of hits per at-bat. Each hit in a batting average calculation is counted as one, whether it is a single, double, triple, or home run. Therefore, when we subtract that percentage of hits to at-bats from his number of bases per at-bat, we are left with the percentage that depicts a player’s ability to get more than one base per at-bat. Since extra base hits are worth more fantasy points to us, you can see why knowing the guys who are the best at hitting more than singles would be valuable information.
Calling it a measure of raw power though is a little bit misleading, as our first example below will show. The best way to look at Isolated Power for fantasy purposes is to think of it as the most predictive stat when looking for hitters who can get you an extra-base hit. Using this in conjunction with some of the other metrics we talk about in the course is the best way to predict home runs. ISO is still one of my favorite stats to use in my analysis of potential players to roster and it yields excellent results, but if you ever hear someone refer to it as the silver bullet in predicting home runs, you will know better.
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