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Top 10 Ways to Win at Daily Fantasy Baseball

You can search the web over and find article after article offering advice, strategy, and keys to winning at DFS MLB. But, most can be boiled down to these Top 10 fantasy baseball tips. If you want to know how to win at daily fantasy baseball, follow these simple keys.

1- Pick Your Pitcher

The simplest statistics in finding your pitcher are Vegas odds, K%, and OppK%.   I want you to write these statistics down.  There are a lot of sources that display them for you.   Find those sources that show them side-by-side for easy viewing.

Vegas odds show you who is most heavily favored.  The larger the negative number, the more confident Vegas is in that team winning the game.  While that doesn’t directly point to your starting pitcher, it does indirectly put him in a very good spot to pick up the decision.  K% is how often your starting pitcher strikes out the batters he faces.  It should be clear that the higher the number here, the more strikeouts your pitcher earns.  The more strikeouts your pitcher earns, the more points he compiles for your fantasy baseball team.  Strikeouts are a very important part of fantasy scoring.  OppK% is how often the opposing team strikes out.  Again, the higher the number the better matchup your pitcher faces.

Look for these three stats to work together.  The cream of the crop is a pitcher heavily favored in Vegas that strikes out a lot of hitters he faces drawing a matchup with a team highly prone to striking out themselves.  You find the best combination of those qualities on the night, and you have yourself a very good starting point for building a winning fantasy team.

If you are new to daily fantasy baseball, you may want to look an article series currently under construction called The Hard Nine.  The goal is to teach the newest DFS player the ins and outs of baseball as quickly as possible.

2- Attack Starting Pitching

You might think that attacking a starting pitcher is simply the opposite of the above description.  While that’s not terrible, there is a simpler way.  SIERA is a statistic that tells us what ERA a pitcher should be pitching to if the luck factor of baseball was removed.  Pitchers with high SIERAs are typically bad pitchers that yield a lot of fantasy points to opposing hitters.  We want to roster those hitters.

Look for pitchers with SIERAs over 5.00 and write them down.  As a backup, look for those with SIERAs over 4.50 and also write them down.  You have typically just narrowed the entire pitching pool down to about 5-10 pitchers to attack.

3- Locate the Best Fantasy Baseball Offenses of the Night

It sounds like we just did that in section two, but we didn’t quite get there.  Sometimes, there are discrepancies between bad pitching and great hitting.  Vegas offers implied run totals for offenses each night.  I’m not saying implied run totals are foolproof by any means.  I’m saying they help us check off boxes leading to offenses in great matchups.

Also write down the offenses implied by Vegas to score the most runs on the night.  Over 4.00 is good.  Over 4.50 is great.  If you rank them in decreasing order, you can focus on the top offenses of the night.  Again, you’ve likely narrowed the entire league playing tonight down to about 5 teams worth focusing on.  You can find my daily glance at a slate by heading to our DFS Baseball Articles section.  I call it “Chop’s Chin Music” and it’s designed to get you pointed in the very direction I’m laying out here.  You will also find a host of other articles and tools in this section.

4- Emphasize Offenses on Both Lists

What we look for here is overlap.  We will note teams that appear on one of the above hitting lists or the other.  But, we will focus on the teams that appear on both lists.  An offense facing a high SIERA pitcher that Vegas also believes will be one of the highest scoring teams on the night is usually in a great matchup and worthy of our focus.  We can typically cut our lists down to 3-5 teams very easily in mere minutes this way.

5- Locate the Producing Hitters

We now have our teams worthy of our focus.  Not all of them will produce, though.  Once we find the key production from an offense, we can ignore all the traps and trash mixed into their lineups that will kill our fantasy lineup.  We want to focus on only the best of the best.

6- Focus on the Top of the Batting Order

Hopefully, you already understand the logic that the leadoff hitter will receive the most at bats of any player on the night.  With 27 outs in a 9 inning game, each hitter will see 3 ABs in a perfectly pitched game.  The first mistake by a pitcher (a walk, a hit, etc) means the leadoff hitter just earned his 4th at bat.  The more mistakes, the more hitters earn 4th at bats.  Divide the number 1 into 9 and you get 11%.  For each spot your hitter is below the leadoff position in the batting order, his chances of getting an extra at bat drop by 11%.  That’s a lot!  If you take the 7th hitter over the 2nd hitter, there is a 55% less chance he will see that fourth at bat compared to the 2nd place hitter.

At bats are our opportunities to score points.  We need a lot of at bats, as many as possible, to beat our opponents.  Fantasy baseball is about maximizing the small edges and letting the numbers play out.  The number of at bats in a daily fantasy lineup is one of the most overlooked “edges” of all, and we can absolutely fix it by focusing on the tops of the batting orders.  I’m not a fan of rostering any hitter below the 5th spot, and rarely do I get to the 6th spot.  If you bat 8th, you are virtually dead to me.  You simply aren’t going to see enough at bats.

7- Key Statistics for Fantasy Baseball Hitters

Hopefully, you wrote down your target offenses.  By now, I hope you wrote down the players in the top 5, maybe 6, batting slots.  Now, we can locate the producers with some statistics.

My favorite statistics for hitters are OBP, ISO, and wOBA.  OBP is simply “On-Base Percentage.”  In fantasy baseball, we want hitters that don’t make outs.  If a hitter isn’t on base, he can’t score points.  .350 is acceptable in daily fantasy, but .400+ is elite.  ISO is your “Isolated Power” and it helps us recognize who hits the ball into the gaps and over fences.  For ISO, .175 is pretty good and .200+ is elite.  wOBA is “Weighted On-Base Average” and it treats base hits differently.  wOBA offers more weight to a home run than it does to a double than it does to a single or a walk.  All hits are not created equal.  A homerun is more valuable to us than a single.  High wOBAs attempt to show us who does the most damage with their at bats.

I will look at these statistics over a few time frames.  I want a full season, or even two years, as a baseline for a player.  Hitting in baseball is a flukey endeavor.  I want a large sample to smooth out the ups and downs all players go through during a season.  From there, I start looking at the last 4 weeks.  A shorter time frame can show me who is running hotter than their baseline and who is running colder.  Obviously, I want the hotter hitters on my team for the night in hopes they continue hitting.  I will even look at the last week in an attempt to see if a hitter I’ve identified as “cold” is starting to come out of a slump.  Personally, I don’t need to be the first person on the train, but I don’t want to be the last one on it, either.

I circle the players that are hitting well and ignore the players in slumps.  Of the few offenses I target on a night, I am now down to less than half the players on those teams.  This is the player pool from which I will assemble my team(s) for the night.

8- Batter vs Pitcher History

Another area to crosscheck is a batter’s history against a particular pitcher.  Some hitters just see the ball better out of a certain pitcher’s hand.  Other hitters can’t locate a pitcher’s release point no matter what they try.  We can find a batter’s numbers vs a the starting pitcher on a number of websites.  All you have to do is search “batter vs pitcher” and pick a site from the long list that pulls up.

BvP is interesting around the daily fantasy baseball industry because it doesn’t usually carry a large sample of at bats.  I just mentioned I want a full season of numbers as a baseline to smooth out the ups and downs.  Well, a full season contains about 400 at bats to right handed pitchers and about 200 at bats to left handers.  You will never find a 400 at bat sample vs a particular pitcher.  So, the debate from many is BvP is completely useless.  I disagree, sort of.

All I want a decent sample size.  I look for about 20 at bats before I start considering the hitter as seeing the pitcher well.  But, I won’t ignore a hitter that has 3 homeruns off a pitcher in just 8 at bats, either.  I use this history as a tie-breaker of sorts.  I don’t roster hitters solely on BvP, but I most definitely look at the history if that makes sense.

9- Assemble Value Hitters First, Studs Later

Most daily fantasy baseball players will pick a pitcher, then a catcher, than a first baseman, and so on until they have nothing but outfielders remaining.  Along this path, many players will say things like, “I need a cheap catcher because I never pay up for them.”  These thoughts are terrible.  Each slate is different and offers it’s value (mismatched pricing) in different ways.  Your job is to find it, to solve the puzzle.

The best way to do this is to locate your most valuable hitters first.  Note, I didn’t say cheapest hitters.  Value comes in a couple of forms.  One is price for sure.  Another, though, is hidden inside the position.  Position scarcity is a topic that isn’t discussed often enough.  If you go through my checklist and only have two catchers on your list, you have identified to VERY VALUABLE catchers.  I don’t care what their price is.  You might start there.  You might even have to pay a premium for that catcher.  That’s perfectly fine.

You might also find a position like shortstop has 6 viable choices tonight.  Save that spot for later in your lineup building process.  Come back to it when you’ve found more valuable positions.  On a list of 6, you most likely have a couple expensive players, a couple cheap players, and a couple in the middle.

Let’s say we find a few hitters in phenomenal spots hitting top 5 in their orders, facing horrible pitching, and that have great OBP, ISO, and wOBA numbers.  Lock them in.  If you paid up for pitching (which you likely had to), you need this cheap salary player to drive your average cost per player back down to reasonable levels.  Lock him in and then start working your way up.

Using these two philosophies in conjunction with each other will take you to the next level in your lineup building and competitiveness.  When I started thinking of my lineups in this way, I hit another level of thinking about tournaments, cash games, and winning.  I also started having more fun immediately.  Usually, by the time my lineup got down to it’s final two or three spots, I had so much money leftover my choice was “Bryce Harper or Mike Trout” not “Keke Hernandez or Stephen Drew.”  If you build the old way, you have asked that second question to yourself more times than you can count.  Wouldn’t it be more fun to ask the first question?

10- Assemble More Than One Fantasy Baseball Lineup

Can I get real with you for a second?  I’m typically a single lineup builder.  I like trying to take the best of the best and put them together in a lot of different contests.  But, fantasy baseball is just too volatile to live that way.  If you win once out of every 10 lineups you build, that means you will win once about every week and a half.  That’s not much fun.  These days, I tend to build 3-5 lineups per night I play.

By building more than one lineup, I get to do a couple of things.  First, I take several shots at the tournaments I enter.  Second, I get to play a variety of players I want to play.  I don’t have to make decisions between Bryce Harper and Mike Trout and guess wrong.  I can play both, in different lineups, and if one goes off I have a chance at that lineup winning.  Third, I smooth out the volatility of the game of baseball a bit by hopefully winning a few lineups and losing only a couple.  To me, it’s a much more enjoyable way to watch baseball every night.  I’ve also found my losing nights might be down a few bucks instead of everything I entered.  That makes a huge difference for me, mentally, and keeps me level-headed through the entire season.

Final Thoughts

Smart money management is undoubtedly key to how to win at daily fantasy baseball. To learn more, read my piece covering the subject by clicking this link.  Bankroll Management

Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @Choppodong and look into becoming a VIP inside the DFS Army.  We are constantly talking about daily fantasy baseball strategy in real-time and trying our best to teach every level of player to get better at the game we love to play. Coaches for every sport are waiting to connect with you today.