For my first entry to this community’s content, I decided to explore two of my most favorite things in the world; baseball and statistics. Yes, yes…I know…baseball is boring. I try to get my three year old daughter to watch my Milwaukee Brewers with me, and after about 30 seconds of it, she runs to play with a cardboard box. Hey, I get it; but trust me, someday she’ll become a Brewer fan…I just know it.
With that said, I’ve been dabbling a bit this year again with DFS (daily fantasy sports) baseball. I skipped it last year with COVID; what was the point? This year, however, things seem to be back to (somewhat) normal, and I figured I’d throw a dollar in a day to see how well I can do against the algos and professionals. I know I’m not going to win anything, but it’s baseball and it’s something I enjoy keeping tabs on as the night goes on.
Yes, I’m using Fanduel. For those who aren’t familiar, there is a scoring system for each position player. So…you get a budget each day of $35,000 fictitious USD, and draft a player. For example, you have to draft one starting pitcher and eight position players. Because there is fixed budget amount, better players cost more dollars, and prevent you drafting a team of Mike Trout and Tatis’; to win, you have to find players that don’t cost as much money and draft them, and hope they have a good night. The scoring system looks as such:
To start with, let's look at starting pitching and points earned. From what you can see here, a Win contributes 12 points to your team's total points...so let's take a look at a potential for determining win %.
A win, worth 12 points, which makes up 42% of the average points earned for starting pitchers, means the starting pitcher pitches at least five innings and must his team must be in the lead for the rest of the game when he departs the game. Easy enough, right? Well baseball statistics, for the most part, consider wins as a insignificant statistic. Yet it is 12 pts, so let's see if we can see any trends based on MLB lines thus far.
So...no surprise. The lower the money line, the higher the % chance for a win. For example, last night, Jack Flaherty for the Cardinals was the starting pitcher against the Pirates at a -219 money line. That means that if you placed a bet on the game, you would have had to place a $219 USD bet on the Cardinals to win to get $319 USD back (excluding any house fees, etc.) From a DFS standpoint, that means you have 40% chance as of three days of data to get 12 points from your DFS lineup by drafing Flaherty as your starting pitcher. Easy enough, yes?
Of course nothing is as easy as it seems. My goal is to document my progress on the sports talk social community each day as I give you my rationale for drafting the team I do. I will also report my progress. You can then laugh at me for throwing away money...that's ok...this is just for fun. It might not be as exciting as Doge coin price versus Elon tweets, but it's something. This will probably bore most of you, but if not, you might find it interesting from a math standpoint. And, if you too love baseball, even better! I used to do technical analysis on coins I held, but let's try something else from a statistical standpoint, eh?
There is a lot more statistics I'm working on that I will share soon; I'll provide updates on thanks for stopping by and taking a look. Go Brewers, too.
