Draftkings Daily Fantasy Baseball Strategy – Everything You Need To Know To Dominate – Updated for 2015

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Scoring System


The first step in our process is understanding the scoring rules for each site. I’m focusing on Draftkings today because that’s the site I mainly use to play Daily Fantasy Baseball for reasons I will cover shortly. Below is a graphic that covers the scoring rules on Draftkings. Note that Draftkings requires you to use hitters from at least 3 different teams.

HOW TO PLAY

Daily Fantasy Baseball Lineup Construction Strategy

Earlier I mentioned that I mainly play Daily Fantasy Baseball on Draftkings. I do this for two reasons. First is that some of the other sites require using hitters from 4 different teams. That waters down the team stacking strategy I will cover in a moment. The next is the way Draftkings posts starting lineups around an hour before gametime. You need to use the desktop site to take advantage of this but I find seeing the lineup and batting order visualized with salaries to be extremely helpful. As a bonus, Draftkings runs one or two Freerolls per day in baseball so that’s a few dollars less I had to spend in order to test out this methodology.

The number one lesson I learned in my Daily Fantasy Baseball adventures last season was to spend
money on the pitcher. The keys are strikeouts and wins. Skimping on the Pitcher spot in order to have extra money to spend on big name sluggers is a risky strategy that rarely paid off as I learned early on. Batters often go hittess and return a zero. Pitchers are always scoring points and they get a sweet 5 point bonus for getting the win. Pitching is relatively consistent in Baseball. I like to check the pitchers stats for their previous few games. Remember, based on the scoring system, we are mainly looking for Strikeouts and Wins. As I mentioned earlier it helps to know which teams strike out often (Think 2014 NY Mets) or are simply bad on Offense (2014 Padres). Sometimes you can find a hidden gem with a lower priced pitcher facing a team with a bad offense. This usually occurs with recent call ups that haven’t had enough time in the Majors to pump up their salaries.

Picking high priced big name pitchers was easy. The hard part is constructing the rest of the lineup. As someone that doesn’t watch baseball it’s particularly difficult to come up with lineups as the Daily Fantasy sites don’t distinguish between full time players and platoon or bench players. Constructing lineups for any sport generally requires targeting some low cost players to fill out lineups (this also is what allows one to grab some of the higher priced pitchers and still field a competitive team.)A Simple Matchup Strategy – Its all about the STACK!!


We already established the advantage of going with premier pitchers in daily fantasy baseball. Now lets talk about constructing matchup based lineups for the position players. Draftkings has a feature in their lineup selection page that shows the starting lineups for each team once they are released. This generally happens a few hours before game time. Last season, after a week or two of struggling to put lineups together with numerous debacles I finally discovered the feature. My strategy is to look through all of those lineup cards and target three or four games in which the opposing starting pitcher was bad. Then target the position players that are facing the bad pitcher. To further narrow down the choices I tried to stick to position players that were facing bad pitchers and also were hitting from the proper side of the plate to exploit said bad pitcher.In Baseball more then most other sports team offenses are very much tied together statistically. If a team goes off for 8-10 runs on a given day there is a high likely hood that most of their batters had a good day. This can often be a function of facing a mediocre pitcher that implodes. This is the baseline for my GPP strategy. Try to figure out which pitcher stinks and is likely to implode. Then stack as many of the batters facing them as we can.

It seems so obvious but sometimes simple solutions are best. Working off of the released lineup cards adds a dimension in that I was able to avoid the mistake of grabbing players that wind up not starting that day. To further narrow down the choices I look to stack position players that are batting in the middle of the lineup. Players batting 7th 8th or 9th get fewer at bats and tend not to score as many RBI.

Above is a sample of how Draftkings shows each game on their lineup page. Clicking on Depth Charts a few hours before game-time will produce a lineup card showing each player, their price, and their spot in the lineup. The key is stacking position players facing low quality opposing pitching. Since Draftkings requires us to use batters from 3 different teams I’ll normally target two teams for stacking, then find one final player that fits my remaining salary and has a compelling reason to use them. I like to check history vs the pitcher they are facing that day or simply target a slugger facing a mediocre pitcher that fits my Lefty vs Righty vs Lefty criterion.

Weather Trap

Another thing to pay attention to is the weather icons. In Daily Fantasy Baseball if your players game is cancelled due to a rain-out you lose that players production. In the example above the KC Baltimore game as well as the SD Was game are showing a chance of showers. Those games should be avoided at all costs. It’s just not worth the risk.

Conclusion


Using the techniques above I had a reasonable level of success placing in GPP contests in 2014. Understanding the connected relationships between hitters on a given team is key. Taking advantage of the fact that Draftkings allows stacking and only requires players to use hitters from 3 teams gives us an edge over players that don’t understand this relationship and should produce +EV returns over the course of the season.