Now that we have discussed the basics about how FanDuel, DraftKings, and daily fantasy baseball works, we can start talking about the strategies we will want to use to build lineups. A quick Google search for “MLB DFS Strategy” yields tons of common strategies used by players across the inter-webs. These strategies can range from beginner to advanced. Let’s start with a general overview of some of the most common strategies in this article. I’ll come back and link to more detailed breakdowns as we deep dive into some of these in future posts.
Stacking
This is possibly the most common DSF strategy in baseball contests. Stacking just means that you select multiple players from the same team, usually 3 or 4. There are a few reasons why this strategy makes sense. I found many articles that prove these ideas mathematically. If you want to read more about that, you can check out some of them here and here. I’ll summarize the main takeaways, but since others have already done the math to prove it, I won’t bother with that here. I just want to talk about general strategy for now.
- If you choose several players from the same team, it allows you to have several players going against a specific bad pitcher. Bad pitchers give up more fantasy points to batters, so we can capitalize on this more by picking 4 players against that bad pitcher instead of just 1.
- There is a correlation between fantasy performances of players on the same team. Usually players on the same team will do better than average together or worse than average together. This goes back to the “boom or bust” strategy we talked about earlier.
- Stacking allows you to choose multiple players in other advantageous positions. This can allow you to capitalize more on things like hitter’s parks, or good weather.
Batting Order
A good general rule of thumb: pick players closer to the top of the batting order. You can read more about the math behind this here, but the logic is simple. Players batting at the top of the order get more at bats. Extra at bats equals extra opportunities to score fantasy points, which may lead to actually scoring more fantasy points.
Weather
Most importantly, it’s probably a good idea to avoid players in games with a chance of rain. If you have a player in a game that gets postponed due to rain, that player gets 0 points. It’s nearly impossible to win a large tournament with any zeros in your lineup.
On top of that, players playing in warm or hot games are more likely to score more points than players in cold games. The ball flies a little bit farther in higher temperatures, meaning home runs and extra base hits are going to be a little bit more likely. This translates to more runs scored in MLB games, and more fantasy points for players in that game.
What’s Next?
In the next several posts, we’ll start talking about these strategies in a bit more detail. More importantly, we’ll start talking about how we can set up experiments to test which variations of these strategies produce better results and win more DFS contests.
If you want to play along and enter some FanDuel lineups of your own as we conduct this investigation, you can use my FanDuel referral link here to get a deposit bonus. You should just need to deposit at least $15 within 30 days of signing up, and you’ll get a $15 bonus added to your account if you use that link.
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