Article written by Matthew “Mizzerski” Mieszerski.
We’re always looking for an edge or statistical upside on the field in our DFS competitions. Whether it comes down to finding the right matchups or finding the right trends and the positive correlation between them there’s an advantage to be found.
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I decided to take a look at the correlation between a positive hard hit % and a positive fly ball % rating and the affect it had on a player’s fantasy upside or outcome. We know that a positive hard hit % is a nice indicator of future performances even if the player has seen some poor to mediocre performances of late. Fly ball percentage can be a nice indicator of long ball and extra base potential. The current league average for hard hit % is 30.79% while the average for fly ball % is 35.01%. For this tendency I used a 15 day look back for hitters and the metrics mentioned above. Accounting for recent upside performance, I’ll use hitters that have a hard hit % of 50% or above and a fly ball % of 40% or above in the aforementioned time frame to look and see what the upside and consistency is in their recent fantasy performances. On average we see hitters outperform their daily expected point outcome by roughly 22.9% given the parameters. Of course we know that more often than not, what truly decides a hitters value on the day or even the likelihood we roster them is dependent on the pitching matchup they’re up against. So if we wanted to narrow this search even further we can extend the same data look to starting pitchers so we can see if there are any glaring opportunities in a given matchup. With our data search we find that pitchers who are allowing the same percentages listed above in their last 15 days typically underperform in relation to their daily projected total in a 50% clip, albeit slightly (usually less or equal to 1 fantasy point.)
If we look at today’s slate we can use our trend to come up with a handful of hitters that provide some decent upside to outperform their projected fantasy total on the given day. Given Miggy’s (5.1K) last few games he’s not really a hard sell here but nonetheless his hard hit % is up to 50% over the previous 15 days and his flyball % is up to 47% over the same stretch. Justin Upton (3.4K) has had a solid eight game stretch and while they do face Syndergaard in today’s game the Tigers still have a projected run total of 3.9. Yes, Mike Zunino (2.9K) is projected to hit 8th for the M’s today but in today’s game he’s facing the artist formerly known as Big-Time Timmy-Jim and falls square into the positive side of our data search.
That’s all folks! Be sure to follow me on Twitter for more player analysis and news as starting lineups are released! Commentary based on DraftKings & Fanduel strategy and scoring.