Handicapping Daily Fantasy Baseball Pitchers

Handicapping Daily Fantasy Baseball Pitchers: The Basics (Part I of II)
By Adam, Daily Fantasy Baseball Fantatic, Rotopicks.com

DraftKings rosters use two pitchers and FanDuel rosters use 1 pitcher. Starting pitchers are the most expensive (and arguably most important) position on your roster. So let's get to it! Pitching analysis and choosing pitchers... the basics.

Since pitchers' salary cap values can be more than double the best hitter's value, it is important to make sure you pick the right pitcher(s). If possible, I highly recommend picking three starting pitchers, since they are guaranteed points (well, almost!), as opposed to two starting pitchers and a relief pitcher who may not pitch today. That said, due to salary cap implications, it is very difficult to choose the stud starting pitchers of the day if you roll with three starters. So, we need to be able to dig through the mud that is statistics, and find three mid-tier starting pitchers.

Step number one is to look up the Las Vegas lines and find the over/under for each team. We want to find the teams who are projected to score the least runs obviously. Less than four runs is a good barometer. Second, we want a starting pitcher who is pitching against one of those teams, who is highly favored to win (-150 money line or better is great). Mix and match and check salaries and you may be able to find your guys. If not, no worries. Let's dig into basic pitching statistics.

The best place to start is on any sortable web site with baseball stats. You can filter the players by starting pitchers who are pitching today and can filter by stats over the entire year, last year, and the last 15 days. The stats they display are: earned run average, wins, saves, strikeouts, and FPPG which stands for fantasy points per game. When you click on a pitcher's profile, more stats are added: games, innings pitched, losses, QS which stands for quality starts, complete games, hits, walks, and WHIP (walks + hits per inning pitched). For all intents and purposes, these stats make up a solid foundation for a basic pitching article on statistics.

Let's look at earned run average and WHIP, since these are the two most common statistics for pitchers. Earned run average is basically how many earned runs a pitcher gives up per every nine innings pitched. Under 3.00 is great. Above 4.50 is bad.

WHIP, walks plus hits per inning pitched, is exactly how it sounds. Total the pitcher's walks and hits and divide it by innings pitched. Anything less than 1.15 is good. Less than 1.00 is fantastic.

The next statistic I want to look at is quality starts. A quality start is a start in which a pitcher tosses at least six innings and allows no greater than three earned runs. I like quality starts because it tells you how consistent a pitcher is. A pitcher can have a good earned run average, a good WHIP, and a nice strikeout total, but not get many quality starts, as strange as that may seem. The opposite, however, is rarely true - if a pitcher's outings are mostly quality starts, his stats will usually be good (strikeouts not included because strikeouts are not used in the calculation of a quality start). We can also take the pitcher's strikeout total and divide it by his outings or innings pitched to see his strikeout ability. One strikeout per inning is fantastic.

You should also take a glimpse at the pitchers' game logs and/or batter vs. pitcher stats. Here you can see if the pitcher has faced today's opponent before to see how they fared last time. You can also see if the pitcher is succeeding or struggling as of late. I am a huge proponent of looking at a pitcher's game logs, and then investigating those findings.

Another useful tool is to use splits. Split statistics are stats that are split between opposing areas: such as vs. left handed batters and vs. right handed batters, home and away, grass and turf. This is very important as these trends tend to have reasons.

So, in conclusion, here are the basic steps I use:
1. Check to see which pitchers are favorites against predicted low scoring teams. Make sure these pitchers are not the most elite for the day. 2. Look at the yearly stats like quality starts to gauge their performance thus far. 3. Lastly, check their game logs and splits for any red flags.

Check out Part II of this article right here: Handicapping Daily Fantasy Baseball Pitchers: Advanced Strategy.

Good luck and as always, thanks for reading!

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