Walks: Predictable and an Underrated Key to Stacking
I am a very conservative guy. Boring is probably an even better word to describe me. I do not get involved in risky investments or excited about slick sales pitches. In season-long fantasy leagues, I am the guy drafting dull old veterans like Matt Holliday while everyone else is chasing the next big thing like Kris Bryant or Joc Pederson. I prefer a very small but guaranteed interest rate over a high upside stock with volatility. It’s just the way I am built, and it suits me well in some cases, and probably not as well in others.
One area of DFS play where I differ from a lot of experts is that I like walks. It is much more exciting to chase home runs and the big paydays that come with them. But in cash games, I do not always want to play for a high-upside but low-probability event like a home run. Of every way for a hitter to get points in DFS, walks are by far the easiest to predict. Sure, you lose out on the possibility of an extra base hit and RBI with a walk, but walks are free points, and you can clearly see where they are likely to come from. Just as with strikeouts, pitcher’s walk rates are consistent and predictable.
Pitcher Walk Rates
To get a clear picture of what good and bad walk rates look like, here’s a look at the best and worst walk rates from pitchers in 2014.
Highest (worst) walk rates in 2014 (strikeout rate in parenthesis):
Francisco Liriano – 11.7% (25.3%)
CJ Wilson – 11.2% (19.8%)
A.J. Burnett – 10.3% (20.3%)
Roberto Hernandez – 10.1% (14.5%)
Zack Wheeler – 10.0% (23.6%)
Travis Wood – 9.7% (18.7%)
Shelby Miller – 9.6% (16.6%)
Jarred Cosart – 9.5% (15.0%)
Roenis Elias – 9.2% (20.6%)
Tyson Ross – 8.9% (24.0%)
And the lowest (best) walk rates in 2014:
Phil Hughes – 1.9% (21.8%)
Hisashi Iwakuma – 3.0% (21.7%)
Bartolo Colon – 3.6% (17.9%)
Jordan Zimmermann – 3.6% (22.8%)
Doug Fister – 3.6% (14.8%)
David Price – 3.8% (26.9%)
Brandon McCarthy – 4.0% (20.9%)
Clayton Kershaw – 4.1% (31.9%)
Henderson Alvarez – 4.3% (14.4%)
Hiroki Kuroda – 4.3% (17.8%)
You’ll notice from the 2 lists that anything approaching 10 percent is a very high walk rate, while below, 4 percent is an elite walk rate. If you glance at the 10 best walk rates, you’ll find some top-of-the-line pitchers in Cy Young award winners Clayton Kershaw and David Price who stand out not just for their low walk rate, but carrying an elite strikeout rate along with it. These are the pitchers you want to avoid playing against. You’ll probably already know to stay away based on their names and reputations, but from a numbers standpoint, playing against a high-strikeout, low-walk pitcher gives you very little chance of success.
Now, when you look at the list of high walk pitchers, what you want to target is high walks and low strikeouts, as that gives you the highest combined chance of a walk or a hit. Let’s dig into some real life numbers from these two lists in 2014 to see how it affects your DFS scoring.
Roberto Hernandez has the lowest strikeouts rate on the high-walk list, so he should be a solid target for opponents in cash games. On the opposite side, Doug Fister had a similarly low strikeout rate of 14.8 percent, but he had just a 3.6 percent walk rate compared to Hernandez at 10.1 percent.
Both Hernandez and Fister pitched 164 innings and had fortunate but similar BABIP’s in 2014, Hernandez at .266 and Fister at .262. They also had nearly identical batted ball rates, Hernandez at 50 percent ground balls/20 percent line drives/30 percent fly balls and Fister at 49/17/34. They were remarkably similar pitchers outside of the vastly different walk rate.
Let’s see how their numbers actually played out in 2014.
Roberto Hernandez
164 innings pitched, 722 batters faced.
14.5 percent K rate = 105 K
10.1 percent BB rate = 73 walks
156 hits allowed, 84 runs allowed
Doug Fister
164 innings pitched, 662 batters faced
14.8 percent K rate = 98 K
3.6 percent BB rate = 24 walks
153 hits allowed, 52 runs allowed
What do you notice about the difference in these numbers? There are two big differences. First, the raw number of walks: 73-24. That’s not just a difference of 49 walks, but 49 fantasy points on FanDuel and 98 fantasy points on DraftKings.
Second is the difference of 32 additional runs allowed by Hernandez. That’s a huge number, despite not giving up more hits (or more home runs) than Fister. What you are seeing there is the side effect of giving up so many walks. It is allowing more baserunners, and extending innings, so that those same 150 hits come with more runners on base via the walk, leading to more runs.
So while the first key in targeting hitters against high walk pitchers is the actual points you get from the walk, there is additional upside in stacking against high-walk pitchers as they are much more prone to high volumes of runners on base.
Batter Walk Rates
As is the case with all of these metrics, you are not just looking at the pitcher alone, but the same metrics of the hitters to play against them. Walks are the simplest of all these groups to see. The league leader in walks in 2014 was Carlos Santana at 17.1 percent. He walked 113 times in 660 plate appearances in 2014. But that walk rate is essentially meaningless against a pitcher like Doug Fister. I would only look at Santana’s contact rate as a means to decide on whether to play him against Fister. But facing Roberto Hernandez, who walked four batters per nine innings, Santana’s walk rate gives him an extremely high chance of scoring points in that matchup.
This strategy of looking at walks in cash games is a more viable strategy on a site like FanDuel, where a hitter receives negative points for an out. One walk guarantees your hitter will give you positive points on the day, with the added chance of runs scored. On a site without negative scores for outs, like DraftKings, I am less likely to worry about chasing walks. On those sites, what I am using a pitcher’s walk rate for is in determining which pitchers to stack against. As we saw in the Roberto Hernandez example, the walks lead to more batters faced, more runners on base, and therefore, more big innings.
DFS Takeaways
Walks in and of themselves are moderately useful, as you get points from your hitters for a walk. But, the real reason walk rates matter is that the more a pitcher walks, the better the chance of running into a big inning. I believe walks are one of the underrated stats in finding teams to stack in tournaments. Even the best offenses are going to have a hard time consistently stringing multiple hits together in an inning, but getting some free passes is what allows those hits to be productive.