June 26, 2015

Fantasy Rounders

Change is Afoot

by Doug Thorburn

The format of Fantasy Rounders has stayed relatively consistent this season, with an emphasis on platoons and other split stats for the hitters while focusing on opponents for that day's pitchers, as part of a reflection of those areas where I concentrate my own focus when creating lineups each day for DFS at Draft Kings. As we approach the midpoint of the regular season, a few things have occurred to me regarding this series, namely: we've covered all of the major platoon splits for key players, and we've dived into the opposing lineups that are especially weak, strong, or that have an extreme component to the matchup.

My original goal was to cover more players than the average daily piece while going more in-depth on at least one player per article (typically the under the heading of Recency Bias). However, this method has returned a more shallow breakdown than anticipated, and in at least one sense the strategy worked too well – that is, rather than talk about the same players day in and day out, I found myself going too long between updates.

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With this in mind, Fantasy Rounders is undergoing an overhaul. I will tease some of the changes here today, but the full unveiling won't come until next Monday's piece. There are a couple of thoughts in mind as I work behind the scenes to make this information as useful to the DFS gamer as possible, and in doing so the future articles for Fantasy Rounders will involve a much larger pot of player names, while preserving the approach of stratified categories. Many of the divisions will be familiar – platoons, opponents, recency bias, etc – but the way that information is presented will be undergoing a change, including a new approach of Target and Avoid.

I encourage the readers to drop any and all suggestions into the comments section, critical or otherwise.

Let's take a quick look at the new format (the full version will be more inclusive):

Platoons

Target: Matt Kemp ($4100, +144 OPS), Justin Upton ($4400, +107 OPS), and Derek Norris ($3400, +.080 AVG, +.067 ISO) vs. LHP Robbie Ray ($6100)

Avoid: Shin-soo Choo ($4100, -240 OPS) and Mitch Moreland ($4000, -150 OPS) vs. LHP Mark Buehrle

Steals

Target: Billy Hamilton ($4100, 36-of-42 SB this season) facing Noah Syndergaard.

Baserunners are 3-for-3 on steal attempts versus Syndergaard in the majors this season, they were 4-for-5 in the minors in 2015, and 21-of-26 in 2014.

Avoid: Jose Altuve ($4200, 20-of-26 SB) and George Springer ($4800, 13-of-16 SB) facing Nathan Eovaldi.

Baserunners have gone 0-for-1 on SB attempts against Eovaldi this season, 1-for-6 over the last two seasons, and have attempted just nine steals against Eovaldi over the past four seasons combined.

Price

Target: Ryan Raburn, OF, $2600 vs. LHP Wei-Yin Chen

Avoid: Carlos Correa, SS, $4900 vs. RHP Nathan Eovaldi

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Resources used for this article:

Baseball Prospectus Stats and Player Cards

Draft Kings player prices

Brooks Baseball

Baseball-Reference

www.Weather.com

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Doug Thorburn is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @doug_thorburn
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