I really wanted to label the title of this “Tips from the Dongers Club”, but I was worried about the number of bot responses I would get when I post it on Twitter. So this will just have a boring title of an Educational Series and first up in the lesson plan is talking about Pitching Selections.

There is a saying that everything happens in three’s and if you haven’t noticed by now I try to do things in three’s when it comes to my articles. Three pitchers, three stacks, three hitters per position. Etc. Yes, I stray from it often times but I find that narrowing things down into three categories almost always seems to help me from a decision making standpoint. It’s just like my golf game, once I get past three shots on a hole I start to get bored with it and who doesn’t love to three putt for a 6 on a par 5 so they can put a 3 with a 3? But I digress.

Trusting your GUT in Baseball can be more profitable than trusting your GUT in almost every other DFS sport out there. A lot of this is due to the variance factor but it’s more just how Baseball works. The same is true for selecting pitchers, however pitchers are also the most statistical driven plays in MLB DFS because on any given day they’re going to be the ones who you’ll perceive to have the most impact on your lineup. The reality is that you cannot win in MLB DFS without hitting, but you will find that you lost more often than not because of pitching. So we do not want to make mistakes here and that can be difficult given how challenging it is to find quality pitching talent on given slates.

So definitely trust your gut, but you should have a defined process for how you look at pitchers before using your gut. The gut is one of the final decision factors that go into selecting your 3 pitchers for a slate, and here are the three criteria that I have had the most success with when finding adequate and slate winning pitching choices.

The three criteria any pitcher must fall into to be considered include

A measurable metric of talent
Recent Form
Opponent Strength

You will notice that the three decision points do not include variables such as

Pricing
Weather
Stadium

I will get to those in a moment.

PITCHER CRITERIA

#1 – Measurable Metric of Talent

So what the hell is a measurable metric of talent? It’s a fancy way of saying is the pitcher good? You don’t need to cite statistics with a handful of pitchers like Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Shane Bieber, Yu Darvish to name a few. These are guys who are defined aces and have enough of a sample size to prove that they have talent to justify them in almost any match-up. The decision on using them will come down to other variables which we can get into below. But if the pitcher does not have some specific measurable metric of talent then why do we want to consider them at all? So what is a measurable metric of talent given that you can pull up fangraphs, Baseball Savant, Pitcher List or any other top statistical analysis site out there and find all these different items to measure a pitchers true talent. Many of which are used for evaluating the player over the long haul and for seasonal purposes that’s great. But for DFS what do I really care about?

Let’s start with the most beneficial talent a pitcher can have. Missing bats. Hey pitcher, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to throw strikes and not let the other team hit them. Cool, this article is done now and I can finish my coffee!

Unfortunately it’s not that simple and so we look at metrics like K% and on any given day you’ll find that about 99% of articles (including mine) will at some point mention a pitchers K% as a reason why they are a recommended DFS option for a night. The truth is that most content writers just need an excuse to add information below a players name to make it look like they did a ton of scientific analysis on someone and to keep your eye balls moving along instead of making it look like they just listed names on a sheet of paper. It’s kind of like showing your work in school, but what needs to be discussed is that K% by itself is no more valuable than using ERA or Batting Average against. Two statistics which are completely shunned on by people, yet the reality is batting average against is no less predictive than using K%. Anyways, that’s just my quick rant on it and yes, I will cite K% often in my articles and I am guilty of it too — but how can we dig in a little deeper and narrow down the most important metrics to measure?

CSW% – This is the trendy new statistic which really isn’t that new but we are just now embracing it into mainstream where it’s being tracked, included in box scores and is being promoted by Alex Fast (the inventor and a great follow on Twitter) around on places like MLB Network and even in games on TV. The logic is very simple here. CSW stands for Called Strike Whiff %. It takes the number of called strikes and swinging strikes that a pitcher has in a game and divides it by the total pitches thrown. Basic fucking math. I love it. This is going to really narrow out the pitchers who do not have the ability to get ahead in counts and it can really show us a little more about a pitcher’s true strike-out ability. If the pitcher has to rely upon foul balls to get ahead in a count then he’s likely to wind up throwing too many pitches or eventually not enough strikeouts. Anyone who has a measurement above 30% is considered really good here and what I love about CSW% is that it should honestly be used in a pitchers box score to see game by game what their CSW% was for that game. It’s a great measurement of how well the pitcher was not only commanding their pitches but also getting good movement or enough to fool the opponent. Once we can start to correlate this into the hitting side as well we’re really going to be able to measure over multiple games when a pitcher is performing at a higher skill versus just facing a team full of Rougned Odor’s and Chris Owings’.
xSLG% and Sweet Spot% – The next thing we want to identify is how hard the pitcher is going to get hit when they do get hit. There are two statcast metrics which also get thrown around alot such as Hard Hit % and Sweet Spot %. The problem with HH% is that it can entirely be tied to exit velocity which is tied to the pitchers velocity and obviously the talent of the hitter to generate a higher hard hit rate. The pitchers true sweet spot % is something that I would put a lot of value into over a hard hit rate because it’s showing more when the pitcher is allowing players to square up solid contact and can show scenarios where a pitcher is going to wind up with bad luck because the opponent is simply able to put the ball into play a lot more — even if all the hard hit metrics look good. If you are below 40% on Sweet Spot % then you are doing something right but again it’s not a heavy metric to consider. xSLG or Expected Slugging % will take into account the statcast variables for each batted ball instance to identify what the result of the at bat should have been. This has been one of the more consistent metrics to show how well a pitcher has performed but isn’t necessarily the measurement to show how they will perform going forward. None the less, if the pitcher has a really low xSLG% then they’ve done a good job of reducing hard contact, reducing sweet spot contact and have probably performed well. If you are below .500 you are doing really well here. If you are above .600 you are in the higher danger zone.
wOBA, ISO and yes, ERA – You are not going to hear me reference xFIP or SIERA ever in my articles because I think they are a waste of time. I like simple metrics and at the end of the day we are not scoring pitchers based upon a scale of how well their defense should have helped them out. If a ground ball is hit to the shortstop with 2 outs and a runner on third base, the play is going to be over to first. Let’s say the shortstop is slow and has a weak arm and he is unable to throw out a quality running hitter at first. The official scoring on the play is going to be an infield single because technically the shortstop didn’t make an error he just didn’t make a play. Should you not get charged negative points for the hit and the run? Would certainly be nice but if you watch enough Baseball you are going to see scenarios over and over where the lack of good defense hurts a pitcher more often than not. So it’s great to have measurements which try to remove the fielding element to show the pitchers true skill set, but in DFS Casey Mize is still going to be pitching for the Detroit Tigers next week and so guess what, his ERA might continue to suck because the defense isn’t contributing much behind him. Conversely, a Brewers pitcher right now is going to have a few more fly ball outs for anything hit near Lorenzo Cain and Jackie Bradley Jr (when both healthy) and so I really would expect them to do well here. ERA is very basic and very stupid as a statistic – but it has one of the most important factors for determining how much money you make or lose in DFS. Earned Runs. wOBA and ISO are still the true measurements for a pitcher to calculate their performance allowed by hitters. I don’t love them per say, but I certainly do not hate them. They’re the best baseline stats out there.

#2 – Recent Form

The second criteria to look for would be the pitchers recent form. Throw out the guys who have some dominant measurable metric to them (deGrom, Bieber, etc…). Lets look at those veteran pitchers or those younger arms who are working through things. Not every bad pitcher is going to go out and give up 5-6 runs every single outing. Not every bad pitcher is going to serve up 2 HR per game. Not every “mid range” pitcher with a couple flashy pitches is going to strike out 40% of the batters every game. Guys are going to have performances which exceed and fail their expectations more than not and so we want to see how a pitcher has been performing in last three starts to identify the trend for them. The factors to look at here are:

Who did they play (and where): You have to take into account their performance against the opponent. If this pitcher is frequently an up & down guy and he just shutdown a quality opponent then I’d be worried about his next start.
How many pitches did they throw compared to # of outs: If someone’s last two games were 95 pitches and 4.1 IP and then 105 pitches and 6.0 IP then I know he’s being trusted to throw lots of pitches and in the recent outing was more efficient which should lead to a good outing the next start. Again, we are putting our money out there to get points for # of outs a pitcher can get. Remember to simplify the stats which matter.
Walks and Home Runs allowed: These are the two things which will kill a pitcher and if a pitcher has been struggling in these regards then we probably want to stay away but also dig into why they were walking too many batters in their most recent outing or we’ll probably see a high Sweet Spot rate on them if they gave up a ton of homers too.

Again, use the metrics above in their recent form to see how well they have been pitching but you gotta know the pitcher’s true long term skill here and identify if this is someone who is trending in the right direction or is going to be coming into a bad start.

#3 – Opponent Quality

This should be the easiest of the three factors to identify but it’s often times the one which is looked at incorrectly. Simply put, how well does Team X hit against LHP if we are evaluating a LHP? Well, everyone open up the google machine and type in MLB splits or go to your favorite source (Fangraphs, ESPN, Savant, etc….) and they search for Team X vs LHP splits and they get a sum # and they say WOW this team ranks 28th against LHP in almost every category and they have the 3rd most strikeouts vs LHP. Lets load up on it! And then that team releases a lineup which completely does not measure up to the same measurement.

In almost all of my models and measurements here at DailyAmbush I will factor in the projected opponents splits based upon what the expected lineup is. But furthermore, on the Pitching Dashboard I weigh it based upon the top of the order. If a pitcher is going to have a DOMINANT match-up against the 1-6 hitters in a lineup then that is what I care about the most because there’s no reason for you to be weighing the batting order for a hitter highly if you are not going to weigh it for the pitcher here as well. We want a pitcher who is going to stay out of trouble and most normal managers will bat their best hitters 1-6. It’s why I don’t really care too much about a guy and where he bats in the order because the true talented players are going to be batting 1-6 most of the time. So for a pitcher, lets weigh their match-up more against those hitters than anyone else. There are a TON of teams who’s stats get skewed by the 7, 8 and 9 hole hitters and if the pitcher is having to face these batters with 2 or 3 men on base then I don’t care that he can strike all three of them out because he’s likely going to not pitch deep enough to accure more fantasy points. So weigh the opponent metrics based upon who is going to be in the actual lineup and who is going to be hitting 1-6 and use that to measure the opponent quality.

DECISION VARIABLES

The above three criteria are what I use most consistently to start to identify a pool of pitchers to consider. But now comes the hard part and where we introduce the Gut variable into this as well. We have to make decisions which take into some other variables on these pitchers and we want to get it down to 3 guys to consider. Ideally every pitcher we finish with will have one of the criteria above associated with them otherwise we’re really just going full gut feeling mode, so now we gotta look at some other variables and these are the ones to consider as plus or negatives on pitchers.

Price … The most important factor for price on a pitcher is actually one you never thought of. It’s the number of games on a slate. The more games, the more you can spend on an elite SP. The fewer games the less you should spend on an elite SP
Weather … This can be all sorts of things but certainly it matters for a pitcher early in the season
Umpire … I value this less than others because even though one Umpire is bad for one pitcher he might be good for another.
Ownership … Playing a chalky SP2 on DraftKings because he is simply “cheap” and facing a mediocre team is often a spot to consider fading for good leverage.
Come up with your own … This is where you need to map out what other decision points you want in a pitcher. Do you value Vegas favorites? Do you want a pitcher who’s team lost the game before? Do you like lefty pitchers who wear a # in the 30’s? I don’t care what it is, but you should have consistent decision variables that you trust and you can measure success against time and time again.

Use these variables to give a pitcher a + or a – and then look at the ones who have the most +’s associated with them. Those are your three guys and then weigh them based upon $ and the size of the slate. On FanDuel whenever there is a big slate (Tuesday/Friday) you will find that an ACE pitcher is more often then not the right way to go. This is because the more games means more hitting choices and more ways to put together a lineup of hitters with even a 12k priced pitcher. I have years of experience doing this and I have seen far too many times when someone posts that a 0.9% owned pitcher at $6900 wound up scoring 46 fantasy points on FanDuel on a Tuesday night allowing them to “spend up for bats”. Guess what, they were still wrong because that 12k Jacob deGrom got a 60. Now, you could argue with me here that 46 points on a $6900 pitcher is better than 60 points on a $12,000 pitcher and try to use your math to show that pt/$ he was better.

That’s nice.

Let me know when FanDuel starts rewarding prizes based upon the total pt/$ of just your pitcher. Because I was able to take the security blanket on my 12k pitcher (who by the way, 30-40% of the field also had with me) and one of us (more like 10-20% of us) had the proper balance of pricing on our hitters rather than just playing a bunch of big names or stacking Coors Field because OMG the run totals! You can rest assured that the person who is out there pimping the low owned “sneaky” pitcher on a big FanDuel slate is an MME person who is just showing you that they had “some shares” of pitcher X and if there was one of the elite arms going that night they probably didn’t win all the monies with it. So spare me your screenshot of JUST the fucking pitcher on FanDuel, there’s only one there on a big slate. /end rant.

DraftKings it matters ALOT more. That’s where you need to have three pitchers defined in your player pool. Again, the size of the slate is going to matter here because the more teams on the slate, the more hitting options and the more hitting options the more value to mix and match a combination to take the more consistent arms up top.

A basic rule of thumb when you cannot decide:

10 or more games = Spend on pitching.
6 or fewer games = Spend on hitting.

Hopefully this will help those who are trying to evaluate your pitching selections on any given slate. As you follow my articles and advice you will see that given the slate it can be difficult sometimes to have an easy process to identify just three pitchers for a slate — but we need a fundamental foundation that we can trust for our process each day and this should help guide you down that path.

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