Daily Fantasy Baseball Strategy: Using MLB Splits to Your Advantage
By Adam, Daily Fantasy Baseball Handicapper, Rotopicks.com
Splits are statistics separated into opposing categories. Hitting stats vs. left handed pitchers is a split and hitting stats vs. right handed pitchers is a split. Home versus away statistics. Night and day. Batting leadoff or second. You get the idea.
One of the most powerful weapons in daily fantasy baseball is to focus on "handedness" splits and choose hitters who are righties that face left handed pitchers and vice versa. Over the course of a player's career, success or lack thereof against righties and lefties remains surprisingly constant. If a player mashes against lefties, then he will tend to do so for his entire career. This is why handedness is so important when choosing hitters. In fact, when you take the overall statistics over the course of baseball history hitters who face the opposite handed pitcher have gained about 50 more OPS points than hitters who face pitchers of the same handedness. OPS is on base percentage plus slugging percentage.
On any baseball statistics site, such as Baseball Reference or Fangraphs, you can sort players in the league by their split statistics; namely stats vs. left handed pitching and stats vs. right handed pitching. It is good to be familiar with some of the split leaders when it comes to handedness, so you can spot them immediately on any given day. For instance, I may be a biased Mets fan, but I take notice whenever David Wright is facing a left handed pitcher. He simply has always put up huge numbers against lefties.
One great strategic aspect about splits is they are not always factored into a player's salary. For instance, if a platoon player, who only starts against and mashes left handed pitchers, is in the lineup today, chances are he will be a bargain. DFS site, Fanduel, tends to price players based on yearly and recent performance and simply cannot factor in every split statistic into their pricing algorithm.
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In addition to starting a hitter with the opposite handedness of the pitcher, ballparks have splits as well. Some are better for left handers and some are better for right handers, specifically when it comes to home runs.
The best home run parks for right handed batters are: Toronto, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Colorado, and the Chicago White Sox.
The best home run parks for left handed batters are: Milwaukee, Baltimore, San Diego (Yes, that's right, Petco is actually a good ballpark for left handed home runs), Texas, Cincinatti, Colorado, and Yankee Stadium.
The worst home run ball parks for right handed batters are: Cleveland and Pittsburgh
The worst home run ball parks for left handed batters are: Oakland, San Francisco, Miami, and Minnesota.
You can also check splits for home versus away, day versus night, splits for the number in the order your hitter is slotted, performance against today's pitcher, etc. There are even splits for which day of the week it is. Hey, a trend is a trend.
If you are familiar with Microsoft Excel, it is often a great idea to import stats from a site like Baseball Reference, specifically import split statistics. I have done this with much success. For handedness, I go back a few years for a better sample size. For other splits, I tend to use recent stats. The end result is making a separate, sortable sheet within the Excel file for each split (i.e. one for vs. left handed pitching, one for home stats, etc.). Then I make a main sheet where I can input a player and it spits out all of his split statistics. In a second, I have everything I need to know regarding splits involving today's game for that hitter. It is especially useful when you are torn between two players. A split statistic could be the factor that leads you to choose one player over the other.
There are an infinite amount of splits. Any situation you can think of is technically a split statistic and somewhere in the internet universe, you can actually find the raw data for any situation. There are databases, spreadsheets, highly advanced tools, etc. but the most important thing is to keep an open mind.
When it comes to splits, they are best used to narrow down the field of choices. You would not want to use a hitter who is facing a left handed pitcher if that hitter's career average versus lefties is .220. Once the field is narrowed down, you dig deeper into more obscure splits to single out the players you will roster. Think of it like a pyramid... and if you get good at it, there is King Tut's gold in that pyramid.
Good luck and as always, thanks for reading!
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