September 3, 2015

Fantasy Rounders

Scouting the Pros

by Doug Thorburn

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Something weird happened on Tuesday night. I'm playing in a 20-team, 10-dollar Triple Up with all of the Usual Suspects, and it was a really low-scoring day – I was in 10th place with 76.95 pts, and some of the guys behind me included: Birdwings (15th at 69.10 points), youdacao (17th, 66.95), underjones (19th, 55.1), and PetrGibbons (20th, 45.75). I scoped out the rosters of these regulars, whom I see constantly through the daily grind of finding tournaments to play, and overall there was nothing daunting about their roster construction. They had certain overlap players that were otherwise unrostered, as these regulars clearly use THE BAT (the brainchild of BP alum Derek Carty) or some other projection system to guide decision-making and roster construction, and the fact that the regulars tend to cherry-pick many of the same names tells me that they're largely using the same system.

Then it dawned on me. These systems exist because, flat-out and ego aside, they are better at filtering data than any one person's brain, and though the fleeting nature of baseball leaves open the inevitability that they will have good days and bad days (such as Tuesday), over the course of the long haul these systems will beat the large majority of DFS players. The key to beating the regulars then, is to discover their particular trends and habits that go beyond the extremes in the system. Basically, it means scouting the pros.

The other part of the realization was that I had been blindly avoiding the pros, as if all of them were the same entity, but despite the tendency for overlap they each have particular nuances in how they setup a DFS roster. Tuesday was a good test case, with several high-profile arms taking the hill (including Chris Sale, Madison Bumgarner, Zack Greinke, Gerrit Cole, and Johnny Cueto), and yet the overwhelming majority of these players chose a very specific combination of Sale and Cole. Both pitchers were hit hard, which led to the overall scores being very low, but the commonalities between individual rosters boiled down to these two pitchers and a couple of bargain bats. It was telling that studs such as Miguel Cabrera ($4700), Starling Marte ($4300), and Adam Jones ($3800) were barely owned (all three were owned by this guy, who was the only manager to enlist their services despite reasonable price tags). The intrigue was in how the regulars filled out the rest of the roster, whether preferring a stack or going with individual values, and any frustration over “losing to a computer” was lifted due to the realization that A) I could purchase one of these systems if desired, and B) scouting these pros revealed some of their individual tendencies toward roster construction.

My desire to avoid the pros still has merit, under the assumption that system such as THE BAT are better than I am at honing in on the best values on a day-to-day basis. As a DFS writer and regular player, this is a hard pill to swallow, but the systems wouldn't exist if they weren't good at what they are designed to do. I have seen the results of some of these systems, and what was once a skeptical view of their merits quickly became appreciative of the value inherent in such a system, as time and time again it would recommend a player (a pitcher especially) who had a big day despite my own doubts. However, it's not an end-all be-all, and though any system is bound to have flaws, the best that one can do is to understand how those systems are being implemented and to respond accordingly.

Maybe you see particular values on that day which disagree with the consensus (projection systems love to rank players with a heavy emphasis on opponents, for example), or maybe you scout out a pro who's game appears to be relatively weak beyond the outlier suggestions within the system, and this latter point is where I realized there was money to be made. Despite some of the overlap and commonalities in approach, I did notice some stark differences in that day's roster construction, and further study of their lineups revealed some potential trends. Perhaps these were small-sample blips, but part of the realization was that these regulars offer the most profit potential due to the sheer volume of games that they play, and though it is safe so assume that they are above-average players, perhaps there was a way to exploit their availability by pinpointing those opponents that have a different approach than myself (I have found the toughest opponents to beat are those that approach roster construction the way that I do, thanks to the frequency of overlap). These guys are all over the place, so acquiring the sample size necessary for study is easy, and tournaments like the 20-team triple-up allow one to see the rosters of many of these players at once.

Perhaps one method of profitability on DraftKings isn't just to avoid the pros altogether, but to identify those which offer potential matchup that works in your favor. It can take a long time to avoid these players blindly, and the list of regulars that I was avoiding seemed to be growing by the day, hence making it tougher to find games that were supposedly profitable. Other times I faced opponents with sound strategies whose names didn't happen to ring familiar, but who quickly became subjects of avoidance after viewing their rosters.

The beauty of DFS is that any strategy can be the “right” one on any given day, such that it takes months to see if a particular strategy is profitable or merely a blip on the radar of variation, but with one month to go in the DFS baseball season I have shed the avoidance tag from many players and am back to playing my roster and scouting all opponents, regardless of familiarity. I have to admit that the scouting process is half the fun, while acknowledging that there are probably flaws in my own process of roster construction, but down the stretch I hope to take on more of the regulars in order to take advantage of our differences rather than ignore them. Ignorance may be bliss, but my overly analytic approach to – well everything – will leave me sad and sweaty if not looking out for some of these strategic elements to DFS gaming.

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