FANTASY NEWS

Day Dreamin’: How to turn a profit in daily leagues

Lindyssports.com Staff

March 28, 2015 at 1:58 pm.

Corey Dickerson had a 1.099 OPS at Coors Field last season. (Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports)

Andy Behrens, Lindy’s Sports contributor

First, the bad news: Daily fantasy baseball will probably not transform you into a billionaire. In fact, your oddsof becoming a billionaire — or any other sort of aire — are vanishingly small. Are you an emerging Russian oligarch? No? Well, then it probably ain’t happenin’. Daily games certainly won’t do it.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t profit, in a modest way, from success in daily fantasy games. They’re basically the perfect complement to a standard fantasy portfolio — like palette-cleansers during the long grind of the baseball season.

No matter where you choose to play — or how often you play, or how much you choose to invest — we have a few basic tactics that should enhance your odds, and your bankroll. For our purposes, we’ll assume your ultimate goal is not to quit your job and throw yourself into daily games fulltime.

If that’s your end-game, um … you should do a little more prep work, beyond purchasing a fantasy draft preview. You’re going to need complicated algorithms and a forecasting model tested and re-tested against historical data, and you’ll need to play many games simultaneously. Here, the mission is simply to help you turn $25 into $50, then to $60, then to $70 and so on. Or, failing that, we hope to prevent you from turning $25 into $0.

Here are a few guiding principles:

Know the scoring system, play the settings

This is the most important universal law of fantasy gaming — no matter the sport, no matter the platform. It may seem brutally obvious, but you’d be surprised at the number of players who simply dive into games without understanding the landscape.

In daily, the major platforms have slightly different scoring rules. Hitter strikeouts carry a penalty at one site, but not another. Walks are valued differently relative to singles. Pitchers may accrue one point per inning at one site, and 2.25 points at another.

All of these details are meaningful when attempting to determine which players are most likely to outperform their cost.

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Get your feet wet with 50/50s and Double-Ups

Let’s return to that warning about how you are not, in fact, going to become one of the world’s wealthiest individuals through success in daily fantasy. The lure of the game is often a splashy tournament, promising riches to the shrewdest fantasy player in the pool. Those contests are both fun and legit, of course — someone really will claim a pile of money, and others will claim smaller piles — but your odds of landing the big prize are not the greatest. Thousands of gamers in tournaments are going to pick smart lineups, choosing their players thoughtfully, using proven methods … and they’ll end up donating to the pot.

Winning big in a massive tournament involving thousands of players (and allowing multiple entries per user) will require you to differentiate yourself from the herd, taking a flier or two or five that few others will chance. And if it seems ludicrous to place unlikely bets of that sort … well, yeah. It is.

Thus, we encourage you to get your daily game fi x by playing 50/50 games, or head-to-head matchups — in other words, play a contest that you have a reasonable chance to win. It’s basically the difference between investing $100 in a publicly traded stock or investing $100 in the Mega-Millions. Play for the plausible return, even if it can’t possibly net you enough coin to hit the Maserati dealership. Do this enough times (and do it well) over the long stretch of a baseball season, and you’ll grow your initial investment.

Know your park factors

Look, predicting individual results in any sport on a game-by-game basis is a silly undertaking. That’s the bottom line. And predicting individual daily results in baseball — a sport so dominated by luck that we need six months and 162 games just to sort good teams from bad — is really an absurdly difficult endeavor. You won’t win every contest, nor will you win 70 percent of your contests. This stuff is hard.

But certain factors in baseball can make an outcome more or less likely. We know, for example, that the size and shape and altitude of Coors Field make the park a friendly environment for hitters, and a messy place for pitchers. We also happen to know the extent to which Coors was a hitter-friendly park in 2014, 2013, 2012 and every other year the ball yard has been in use. This information is important.

Did you also know that Target Field boosted run-scoring last season, and that Wrigley Field favored pitchers? Or that Orioles Park was particularly friendly to left-handed power? Or that Marlins Park was unusually triple-friendly?

Ballparks have unique qualities, creating a slightly uneven set of circumstances for players across baseball. This is part of the reason teams themselves employ armies of statisticians. In daily fantasy baseball — and really in all forms of fantasy baseball — you need to keep an eye on ballpark advantages and disadvantages. Over the full course of the fantasy year, you want to do whatever you can to tilt the game in your favor. Which brings us to splits …

Play the RH/LH splits

This is just another small thing that can benefit a player in a given matchup, and can thus assist you in setting a lineup. Left-handed batters, as a group, are at a verifiable disadvantage against left-handed pitchers, relative to their right-handed hitting colleagues. It’s a simple fact, based on decades of statistical evidence. This doesn’t mean Matt Adams can’t possibly homer off Clayton Kershaw — it happened last October, you’ll recall — but it certainly means Adams has an important factor working against him in the matchup, in addition to Kershaw’s general dominating self.

Anyone who’s played fantasy baseball (or watched reality baseball) for any length of time knows that left-handed hitters gain a measurable edge against right-handed pitchers. While right-handed batters don’t quite enjoy the same split advantage against left-handed pitchers historically, it usually beats a lefty-vs.-lefty matchup. MLB managers stack their lineups with this in mind, and daily gamers can, too.

When choosing pitchers, chase favorites and follow the Ks

In all forms of fantasy baseball, pitcher wins are a big deal. As a general rule in daily, you want starting pitchers who are likely to go deep into games and pitch for heavily favored teams. Make sense? Of course it makes sense. This stuff isn’t string-theory; it’s baseball. It’s never a bad idea to use National League-over-American League as a tiebreaking rule for pitchers; scoring in the AL was higher by 0.14 runs per team per game last year, and by 0.25 in 2013.

It’s also important to track team Ks for daily game purposes, because you’ll obviously want to pick on the lineups that strike out the most. Last season, the Cubs, Astros, Marlins, Braves and White Sox ranked 1-5 in most team strikeouts; the Royals, A’s, Rays, Cardinals and Yankees struck out the least.

Don’t obsess over hitter-vs.-pitcher data

This one is almost counter-intuitive. As a general rule, one of the greatest predictors of future success is prior success. So it would seem logical that you might want to start, say, Luis Valbuena when he’s facing Adam Wainwright on some random Tuesday, because he’s 9-for-22 in his career against Wainwright.

The obvious problem here is that Wainwright is awesome, one of the best in the game. You really shouldn’t start anyone who faces him if it can be avoided. It’s a losing proposition. Also, Valbuena is kind of mediocre. That’s a problem, too.

It’s easy to be seduced by hitter-vs.- pitcher stats, but in nearly all cases the data samples are so tiny as to be useless. When the sabermetric community talks “sample size,” this is what they mean. When evaluating any two sets of data that describe a player, you’ll want to place your trust in the deeper, richer set. Over 2,047 major league plate appearances, Valbuena has proven himself to be a .229/.313/.374 hitter. By no means should you have confidence starting him against Adam [bleeping] Wainwright. And that lifetime 9-for-22? It means very little — almost nothing at all. Although he did make contact at least nine times off Waino, which is better than many do.

When they meet again, however, an 0-for-3 result shouldn’t surprise. Because that’s what Wainwright does. It takes months and years of at-bats for a hitter’s talent level to express itself; you should never make daily game spending decisions based on 20 or so data points.

Remember, players can only help when they actually play

Well, duh. Of course. You probably didn’t need an expert for this tidbit.

But we can’t emphasize this point enough: You must stay on top of major league lineups, and account for late changes. Unexpected lineup juggling is the bane of the daily player’s existence.

If you’re playing multiple contests across multiple sites, then it can be difficult to respond to late changes. Still, you need to manage like a hawk, particularly as game time draws near. If you simply pick your lineups over morning coffee and then ignore the mid-day news, we can pretty much guarantee you’ll start an outfielder who strained an oblique during BP. Or you’ll roll with a pitcher who felt a tweak in his shoulder while warming up.

These things happen every day throughout the majors. You can live with a few DNPs in a typical rotisserie league, where every manager is going to experience a few inconvenient late scratches. But when these things happen in daily games, you lose money that day.

Thus, you need to habitually check for updates each day. Assemble a list of MLB beat writers to follow on Twitter, or simply check a player news site with regularity.

If you’re going to profit from playing daily games, then you need to be an active player.