Understanding Batter Splits
If you are like I was when I first started playing on DraftKings and FanDuel, then you probably used season-long fantasy as the gateway drug to your daily fantasy addiction. The hardest thing for me to do when I made the switch was learning how to look at players more like a daily fantasy player does. In season-long leagues, we only really dig into the matchups when we are deciding between which of two players we want to use on a given day. If you were lucky enough to draft a Bryce Harper or a Mike Trout, you play that guy everyday he is in your lineup. The drop off to the next-best option is probably so great that it would almost never make sense to sit him regardless of the matchup. In daily fantasy though, the world is our oyster. If Mike Trout is not the guy we want to spend up on today, we do not have to play him. We can use Harper, or Carlos Gonzalez, or even pay all the way down to a cheaper option if none of the top-priced guys excite us. Therefore, we are less concerned with rostering Trout every day because he is the best player in the majors. What daily fantasy players really want to know is who will be the best player today.
Baseball is a sport with a lot of variance. That is why we look at large sample sizes in order to get a more accurate picture of a player’s abilities. Most players tend to do better against certain types of pitchers. One of the most pronounced and easily tracked ways to break this down is looking at the splits of a hitter against a certain handedness of pitcher. We always have exceptions to every rule, but most batters hit for a higher average against a pitcher of the opposite handedness. That means right-handed batters tend to do better against left-handed pitchers and vice versa. Just using this alone will help you raise your scores by staying away from bad matchups and finding more guys with a chance to outperform in good ones. This is just the icing on the cake, though, as far as the analysis goes. It is barely scratching the surface to a sabermetrician. The reason platoons (playing two players with opposite matchup advantages) have come in vogue recently in Major League Baseball is because certain players hit so much better against pitchers of a certain handedness that the production can be considered elite. Digging deeper into a player’s splits can paint a much clearer picture of his chance of success than just looking at his overall batting average, like most DFS users do when they click on his profile.
Let’s start with a prime example of an expensive player who makes sense to target in a certain matchup:
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