Where to Find Useful Batting Order Info
I’m about to drop some spoiler alerts on y’all, so you were warned. In case you didn’t know, people die in the movies Se7en and The Departed. Shocking, right? Anyway, there were two particular scenes in these movies that shaped me as a teen.
In both movies, there is a scene that sends a common theme: gluttony will get you straight killed. The most obvious is in Se7en where they force-feed a dude so much spaghetti that he explodes when they kick him in the stomach. Cold-blooded, dog. Then in The Departed, Mr. French shoots a guy in the grill right before said guy was about to enjoy a dinner that spanned the entire table.
Basically, this taught me the life lesson that if you are gluttonous, you will die. And spaghetti is the devil’s food. Seems grim, but hey, I was an impressionable teen.
This theme of the fatality of gluttony does not translate to daily fantasy baseball. Here, you need to be gluttonous to survive. Ain’t no Bostonian mobsters waiting to cap you if you accumulate too much volume within a single night.
The problem here, though, is that everyone has the same limitations within the game. You can’t magically roster more players than your opponent (though if you can, please help a brotha out and teach me). Rather, the way you gain that edge is by getting more volume from the players on your squad. The way you do so is through increasing the potential plate appearances of those players.
There are two separate ways to do this. The most obvious is to get guys from high-powered offenses that send more dudes to the plate each night, but you all are smart enough to figure that one out for yourselves. We, rather, are going to be focusing on the role batting order plays in daily fantasy baseball and how to best use it to your advantage.
We’ll first do this through looking at the overall scoring distribution of the majors to see which spots provide the most fantasy points per game. We’ll then break that down by league to see what differences exist between the National and American Leagues.
After that, we’ll check out how the quality of hitters within a lineup changes the overall scoring distribution. This includes looking at how a league-leading hitter affects those around him and investigating the scoring distribution of a team that bats a stud in the two-hole.
Finally, we’ll blow this whole puppy up by looking at how your strategy with respect to batting order should change when you’re in tourneys vis a vis cash games. If this sounds exhilarating to you, we should be friends.
Before all of that, though, it might be important to show you where you can find all of this info. I’ll note beforehand that this is simply the process I use. It doesn’t mean it’s right or anything; it’s just what I’ve found most helpful personally. So let’s get to it!
RotoGrinders
I have four tabs open at all times on my laptop: Twitter, my email, Byron Buxton’s Fangraphs page, and the RotoGrinders lineup page. It is, far and away, your most useful tool when filling out your lineups.
As the lineups start to roll in throughout the afternoon, they will update on the RotoGrinders page, which is the same way any other site would do it. The thing that makes it super convenient for our purposes, though, is that the page includes the pricing of each player. If you’re looking for a punt play so you can squeeze that juicy right-handed bat in the order, this makes it easy to scan each lineup to find which ones have cheap guys hitting high in the lineup.
This is also super helpful when it comes to stacking. If I decide that I want to stack the Tigers, I can easily see which bats within the top half of the order are affordable and, thus, worthy of rostering. I can also check it out to see if there’s someone lower in the order I may want to take a swing at in a tourney based on platoon advantages and pricing. Basically, I just sit here and refresh the page compulsively throughout the day. It’s super productive, I promise.
Fangraphs
Fangraphs has billions of uses, most of which you are probably aware. The reason I use it with regards to lineups, though, is its game log page.
Within each player’s page, there is a section that charts out each game that player has played his entire career. This is helpful for our purposes because it includes a column for spot in the batting order. This can help you to easily spot where a guy is being used and whether he is trending one way or another within the lineup.
As we’ll see later, a player’s position in the batting order has a huge effect on his value. Thus, if you notice that a certain guy is getting more starts in the two-hole as opposed to hitting seventh, you should adjust your valuation of him accordingly before pricing adjusts for the change.
Baseball Reference
Baseball Reference is to team batting orders what Fangraphs is to individuals. If you go to a team’s profile, hover over the drop-down for “Other.” One of the options there is “Batting Orders,” which would take you to a page that shows every batting order that team had used that specific season.
This is helpful as you are doing research either in the morning or the night before. You can see where teams tend to plop their hitters so you know which ones may be the best to target on the upcoming slate. It also shows most common lineups, which can make planning easier. Obviously you’ll still want to check on the lineup once it’s in, but this can at least give you a good idea of what to expect.
If you are able to effectively blend these three sites, you should have yourself a good knowledge of how a team constructs its lineup. Now, it’s time to figure out how to best put that knowledge to the test.