What I Am Searching for In Hitters
I’ve tried to start this lesson about 14 different ways. I’ve tried being clever. I’ve tried being insightful. I’ve tried being introspective. I’ve pushed off writing this lesson for about five days, all because I don’t know how to start it.
That’s dumb.
You don’t care how I start this lesson. All you care about is what you learn from this lesson. (If you happen to be one of the three people who does care how I start this lesson, I’m sorry that I failed you.)
Forget being clever. Right? Let’s just jump into this sucker. Let’s dissect all the things we need to examine in order to really understand what we are looking for in hitters.
What are the Elements I Want All My Hitters to Have?
Before we examine exactly what I look for in hitters — and exactly how I combine our pitcher information with our hitter information — we need to know the end to which these examinations are being made. What, exactly, am I looking for in the hitters I use on my teams?
At all times, there are two things I am trying to target with my hitters: 1) safety and 2) upside.
There is a misconception in MLB DFS that you can only find “safe” hitters at the higher end of the price range (or, some would even tell you that there is no such thing as a “safe” hitter. Heck, you may be thinking that right now yourself, wishing you could explain to me that every hitter’s floor is zero, and as a result, no hitters are safe. To this, I would remind you what we talked about earlier in this course, how we build our team of hitters knowing that one or two might take a zero each day, but if we collect eight guys who all have a good chance to succeed, we can sustain a couple zeroes just fine as the rest of our guys will be doing well, and a couple of our guys will probably be having huge games to offset those zeroes). That was quite a long parenthetical statement. Did you forget what we were talking about before all that? We were talking about the misconception that only expensive hitters can be “safe.”
Listen: once you understand what we are looking for in hitters, you will be surprised at just how often you are able to find hitters at the low end of the price range who have everything we are looking for.
Now, I can’t say I’ve ever put into words exactly what my ideas of “safety” and “upside” are, but I’m going to give it a go in order to provide you with a general idea of what I mean by using these labels.
To read the rest of this lesson, you must purchase the course!
