Welcome to the third part in my series documenting my journey of getting started with daily fantasy baseball. In the first segment, I did some introductory background reading. In the second segment, I took a look at some common statistics that you might be inclined to look at but that have been proven to be misleading (Batter versus Pitcher stats and players in the midst of hot or cold streaks).
More Background Reading
While I was doing my initial background research for Part 1 of this series, I also bought Jonathan Bales’ book “Fantasy Baseball for Smart People”.
The book is a tremendous resource if you’re like me and just getting started. I presume it’s also quite helpful even if you’ve been playing the daily game for a while.
If I’m being honest, you will save yourself a lot of time by buying his book instead of waiting for me to slowly process my own way through DFS and writing about it. Once you read Bales’ book, then come back to me to see how to implement the topics covered in an Excel solution. Bales has created an excellent beginner’s guide to daily fantasy baseball by giving you strategies, tools, websites, and outlining the exact information you should be looking at when generating lineups.
One topic I’ve seen mentioned in the book and repeated many times online is that to be successful at DFS you need to play the game regularly (“grind”) and as such you need to develop an efficient routine that allows you to create quality optimized lineups regularly. My hope is to use Excel (and maybe other technology tools) to do this.
My “Aha Moment”
There are two significant benefits I got from “Fantasy Baseball For Smart People”. The first is that it’s a convenient and complete package. You could probably get nearly all of the information from the book by reading through the various articles I linked to in Part 1 of this series. If you go that route you even get the information for free. But this book will save you time and puts them in a nice easy-to-use and convenient package.
As much as I love technology, I’m still a “book-in-hand” kind of guy. So I bought the paperback, which lets me dog ear pages I want to remember and reference easily in the future. There’s no easy way to do that with the 20-30 articles I linked to in Part 1.
The second big benefit I get from the book is an insight I did not see anywhere else in my prior readings.
The goal isn’t to maximize points (in your lineup), but to maximize win probability.
~ Jonathan Bales – Fantasy Baseball for Smart People
Maybe this is obvious to everyone, but it wasn’t to me. It’s a significant difference between season-long leagues and DFS.
I can’t envision a scenario in a season-long rotisserie league that you would not want to maximize your projected points in the standings. It’s a simple concept that having the most points in the standings gives you the greatest likelihood of winning the league.
But there’s an interesting wrinkle that I alluded to in Part 1 that changes things in DFS. Player selection is not mutually exclusive. I know, I know. There I go again using math words. This is a fancy way of saying that the players you choose for your team can (and inevitably will) overlap with players chosen for other teams.
Bales’ point can be illustrated by a simple example… (more…)
