Yahoo may not have invented
traditional season-long fantasy gaming, but we got it right. The plan
for daily fantasy is exactly the same. Our hope is to become your
preferred home for DFS across the four major sports. Beginning today —
right now, this minute — you can
sign up for daily baseball at Yahoo and use your considerable fantasy skills to profit in a variety of one-day contests.
For
those who haven't yet dabbled in daily, Yahoo's game is a fine place to
get started. We use a simplified salary structure ($200 total budget),
lineup construction is uncomplicated and intuitive, and it's
ridiculously easy to create your own contest. If you're a fantasy
traditionalist — fiercely loyal to your season-long leagues — please
don't think of the daily game as any sort of threat to your way of life.
Daily contests are a perfect complement to a standard fantasy
portfolio. If you regret not drafting any roto shares of, say,
Kris Bryant,
Dallas Keuchel
or whoever else, then daily fantasy baseball provides an opportunity to
invest (and win) mid-season. Daily contests also allow the sort of
instant gratification that's absent in traditional leagues — play today,
profit today.
With the launch of Yahoo's daily game, this seems like an ideal time
to recycle and update some previously published content — our beginner's
guide to daily baseball (
originally posted here,
during the preseason). The tips below are strictly for first-time
players, not for seasoned vets. This certainly is not black-belt-level
advice. If you've already built your forecasting algorithm, you're
dismissed.
Go sign up for a contest or five. But if you'd like to be reminded of my guiding principles for daily MLB contests, read on...
1. Know your scoring settings
AGAIN: KNOW YOUR RULES, KNOW YOUR SETTINGS
This is the most basic piece of fantasy advice, applicable to all
sports, and yet so many managers brush it off. Really, you shouldn't do
much of anything in your life — ever, anywhere — without a careful
examination of the rules and terms. All the major daily games assign
different values to different events, and roster construction changes
from site to site.
Yahoo's rules can be found right here. If you're going to put money at risk, then you'd better understand the scoring system, fully.
2. Vegas is your friend
This is most definitely not
true in all aspects of life, but it's certainly true with daily gaming.
For obvious reasons, you're looking for starting pitchers tied to heavy
favorites — wins are worth a whopping eight points at Yahoo — and you
want batters involved in potentially high-scoring games. Vegas handles
much of the heavy-lifting for you, accounting for park factors, weather
conditions, pitcher quality, lineups and other trends and traits. If
bookmakers expect a big pile of runs to be scored in a given game, you
should seriously consider stacking hitters in those lineups. Simple
enough, right?
Yahoo requires you to choose
players from at least three different MLB teams, with a max of six from
any one squad. So there are limits to your stacking possibilities. It's a
solid tactic nonetheless, because predicting any individual hitter's
performance in a single game is kind of a ridiculous endeavor.
Which brings us to this...
3. Pitching is priceless
OK,
that's not completely accurate, because we actually assign a price to
each pitcher. This is fundamental to the whole DFS thing. I just really
like alliteration in the subheads.
Anyway, here's the point: You absolutely cannot screw up your
pitching choices and still expect to profit. In full-season fantasy
leagues, experts will often recommend going cheap on pitchers, sketching
in your rotation in the late rounds. But in daily games, I'll usually
select my pitchers before scanning the bat rack. Even baseball's most
reliable hitters can easily post an 0-fer at any time, regardless of
matchup. Forecasting any batter's stats for a single day is incredibly
tricky. I always feel more confident in the one-day projection of an
elite starting pitcher at home in a friendly park, against a
less-than-intimidating opponent.
You don't need to build around a Kershaw or Scherzer-level starter
each day (or any day), but you do need to remember that scoring is
driven by strikeouts, wins and run-prevention. When chasing Ks, it's
easy enough to exploit strikeout-prone lineups and avoid others. You
want pitchers who work deep into games, too; every out recorded is worth
0.6 points in Yahoo's game.
4. Don't obsess over batter-vs.-pitcher stats
I won't go so far as to say that player-vs.-player history has zero
relevance, but, in most cases, we're dealing with sample sizes that are
much too small to be useful or predictive. I'm not going to make a
spending decision based on, say, a hitter's 7-for-18 history against a
certain pitcher.
Instead, you should always prefer larger sets of data — the sort of stuff you'll find in
Yahoo's Matchup Ratings,
for example. Most of you already know that handedness of hitters and
pitchers is a big deal; typically, you want left-handed bats facing
right-handed arms.
I hate to suggest that
batter-vs.-pitcher history never matters, however. When two players have
seen each other a few times and one of them consistently wins, well ...
that's not something you can easily ignore. Chris Coghlan versus Mike
Leake has been an unfair fight, just to cite one example (9-for-13, 3
doubles, 2 HR, 0 Ks). If you believe in a specific matchup, play it.
It's your money.
And here's the final and most obvious tip...
5. Players can't help us if they don't play
Nope, you didn't need an expert
for this one. Nothing mysterious here. We simply need to emphasize the
importance of verifying that every player in your daily lineup
is also in his real team's lineup. When you mess around with platoon
players and other part-timers, this is no small detail. In your hometown
roto league, it's not usually a disaster when a player on your active
roster gets an off-day. But in daily, you immediately lose money.
It's easy enough to find reliable sources for batting order info, such as
this Twitter feed.
The difficult part is making a daily habit of daily lineup hawking.
Weather-related postponements are a terror, too. Stay on it.
As in traditional fantasy
baseball, you won't profit from the daily game unless you're an active,
engaged player. The Yahoo fantasy team has been covering daily baseball
all season around here, and we're ecstatic to finally have a game of our
own to discuss.
Sign up, you guys. Game on
