Shortcuts: Team Totals, ERA Estimators, Swinging-Strike Rate
A lot of people ask me how I go about my daily research and how much time it takes me. The truth is that the best way for me to play DFS baseball is to spend hours and hours researching a full-day’s slate of games. Of course, that is just simply not possible or healthy to do every day. If you have a job that requires you to be doing something other than analyzing BABIP and ground ball rates in the middle of the afternoon, you’re going to have days when you simply don’t have time to do all the research you want to do. Thankfully, there are some shortcuts available to help you narrow down your analysis.
Vegas Lines: Team Totals
The first and most important is the Vegas lines. There are millions of dollars bet on baseball every day in Las Vegas, and the oddsmakers there look at every possible angle of a game to set those lines. It would be silly not to take their information into account.
You can find the Vegas lines at dozens of different websites, even find them on RotoGrinders. There are three key numbers you need to understand: the moneyline, the total and the team totals.
I’m not going to explain the ins and outs of moneylines and totals here; most of you are probably already familiar with what the lines looks like. If by chance you’re not, the moneyline shows which team is favored to win, and the total shows the total expected runs from both teams. If you don’t have any concept of how the Vegas lines work, it is easy to find explanations online. What I do want to talk about more in depth is the team totals. This is where you can gain a quick edge in targeting pitchers to play against.
Both the moneyline and total are useful to get a feel for what team is expected to win, and whether the game will be high-scoring or not. But the real number that you want to look at to target which pitchers to play against is the team total.
In a game with an overall total of eight runs, it may be the each team is projected to score four runs, or it could be that one team is projected to score closer to five while the other team is closer to three. Obviously, the higher a team’s projected total, the more you should want to play hitters from that team against the opposing pitcher. Almost all team totals will fall between three to five runs, but seemingly small differences are very important to exploit. All the information I have talked about in this course, in addition to ballpark factors, weather, umpires, and basically every other variable is factored into these numbers.
What you can’t learn from the team totals are the very things I have broken down thus far, including in what manner this pitcher is likely to give up runs. But, again, if you don’t have time to do the proper research, you are much better off leaning on the Vegas lines than just playing your hunches. When possible, I like to have all my hitters from teams with a team total of four runs or more.
If you do all your own research for a day, you should still go look at the team totals and see if the pitchers you found to target also have high team totals against them. If you found something in your research that does not match up with the Vegas lines, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play on it, but I do recommend double-checking the stats and the reason you came to your conclusion. If after further research you still feel you have a reason to play against that pitcher, then you should look at that as a potential contrarian play for tournaments. A lot of DFS players use the Vegas lines, so if you have a strong opinion that differs from it, you can be reasonably confident that it will not be a play that is highly-owned, giving yourself a chance to separate from the pack if you’re right.
ERA Estimators
Another shortcut in analyzing pitchers is to look for differences in a pitcher’s actual ERA and their ERA estimators. There are several different versions of ERA estimators: FIP/xFIP/SIERA are the most common. These three, along with the many other ERA estimators, essentially look at what a pitcher’s ERA would be if all the luck-factors were taken out of play, so a pitcher is only being judged on his skill and not on the events out of his control once a ball is hit into play.
FIP: Fielding-independent pitching measures what a pitcher’s ERA would be if they had a league-average defense and BABIP. It focuses on the “three true outcomes,” strikeouts, walks and home runs.
xFIP: Expected fielding-independent pitching is FIP with the added element of putting the pitcher’s home run to fly ball ratio at league average. While FIP looks at the raw number of home runs allowed, it doesn’t adjust for the flukiness of a pitcher’s home run to fly ball ratio.
Between FIP and xFIP, what you will see is a pitcher who has had good luck on his home run to fly ball ratio will have a higher xFIP than FIP. A pitcher who has been unlucky and has a high home run to fly ball ratio will have a higher FIP and lower xFIP. A pitcher who has a 10 percent home run to fly ball ratio will have a FIP and xFIP that are nearly identical.
SIERA: SIERA puts more emphasis on different types of hits, taking into account that a higher percentage ground balls go for hits than fly balls. I personally prefer SIERA out of these metrics, but all of them are significantly more reliable and predictive than actual ERA.
So, as a shortcut, when you don’t have time to dig into strikeout percentage, walk percentage, ground balls per fly ball, etc., if you just take a look at the day’s slate and look for pitchers with high ERA estimators, you are going to be starting in the right spot. Specifically, a pitcher who has a low surface ERA but a much higher FIP/xFIP/SIERA would be a good pitcher to target against. Your opponents may be scared off by his good ERA, even if it is not a true measure of his skills.
Swinging Strike Rate
One thing I have not touched on yet is the very useful statistic of swinging strike rate. Swinging strike rate is a good measure of a pitcher’s “stuff,” as unlike plain strikeout rate, it measures the number of swings and misses a pitcher generates. A pitcher who is getting a lot of swings and misses is likely to have a high strikeout rate, while a pitcher who has an unusually high strikeout rate but is not getting a lot of swings and misses is more likely to see their strikeout rate come down.
While I don’t use it as a standalone metric, it is valuable in measuring whether a pitcher’s strikeout rate is sustainable. If you see a pitcher who has a history of low strikeout rates go through a streak where he is striking out a lot of batters, swinging strike rate will tell you if that trend is likely to continue.
The league-average swinging strike rate is about 9.5 percent. Anything over 12 percent is elite territory, and when you start getting below eight percent, you can start looking at pitchers to pick on. Here is a look at the best and worst swinging strike rates from 2014 alongside their strikeout rate.
Clayton Kershaw: 14.9 swinging strike rate, 31.9 strikeout rate
Francisco Liriano: 13.7 swinging strike rate, 25.3 strikeout rate
Chris Sale: 12.9 swinging strike rate, 30.4 strikeout rate
Tyson Ross: 12.7 swinging strike rate, 24.0 strikeout rate
Bartolo Colon: 5.6 swinging strike rate, 17.9 strikeout rate
Doug Fister: 6.1 swinging strike rate, 14.8 strikeout rate
Mark Buehrle: 6.3 swinging strike rate, 13.9 strikeout rate
Scott Feldman: 6.3 swinging strike rate, 14.0 strikeout rate
What you are looking for from swinging strike rate is outliers. It appears from this list that Bartolo Colon may have had an artificially-high strikeout rate for a guy with the lowest swinging strike rate in the league. Let’s look at his previous seasons to see what we can learn.
Bartolo Colon 2014: 5.6 swinging strike rate, 17.9 strikeout rate
Bartolo Colon 2013: 6.3 swinging strike rate, 15.2 strikeout rate
Bartolo Colon 2012: 4.7 swinging strike rate, 14.3 strikeout rate
What we find here is that in 2012 and 2013, his strikeout rates were more in line with what you’d expect from a pitcher with a low swinging strike rate. A pitcher is very unlikely to maintain a high strikeout rate with a low swinging strike rate.
There is a lot that goes into swinging strike rate; different types of pitches generate more swings and misses than others, and pitchers can change their approach from year-to-year. For this reason, I don’t recommend overrating swinging strike rate if you have never used it before, but it is a very useful tool to add to your arsenal in finding pitchers to play against.
As I’ve said over and over, so much is unpredictable. You want to give yourself as many chances as possible to get balls his into the field of play. That is never going to happen on a swing and miss, so the lower a pitcher’s swinging strike rate, the better chance your hitters have.