Fantasy Baseball for Smart People: How to Profit Big During MLB Season

By Jonathan Bales

Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s flipped Major League Baseball on its head by questioning widely accepted narratives and approaching roster construction from a scientific, data-driven viewpoint. “Moneyball” revolutionized baseball, and now it’s your turn to be the GM.

Fantasy Baseball for Smart People: How to Profit Big During MLB Season is a Moneyball-esque guide to profiting big bucks from your love of fantasy sports. With analysis from top-ranked daily fantasy player CSURAM88, the book examines the advanced strategies used by daily fantasy sports professionals—the guys making hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars playing fantasy sports—to help equip you with the skill set needed to make money playing fantasy baseball.

How to Profit Big During MLB Season tackles fantasy baseball from a mathematical angle, providing you data on which strategies have actually won in the past and giving you all the information you need to gain a major edge on the field. From how to win large tournaments to which stats matter the most to how to leverage public opinion into a competitive edge, you’ll learn how to use Moneyball in daily fantasy baseball to turn your love of the game into cash.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Bales
• Release date: Feb 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310423864

Jonathan Bales

Jonathan Bales is the author of the Fantasy Football for Smart People series and founder of RotoAcademy. He's a regular contributor to the New York Times, where he posts both "real" and fantasy football content, as well as NBC, Dallas Morning News, RotoWorld, 4for4, and rotoViz. He was a finalist for the FSWA's Fantasy Football Series of the Year award.

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Fantasy Baseball for Smart People: How to Profit Big During MLB Season

Jonathan Bales

Copyright Jonathan Bales 2015

Published at Smashwords

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All Rights Reserved ©2015

Jonathan Bales. First Printing: 2015. The editorial arrangement, analysis, and professional commentary are subject to this copyright notice. No portion of this book may be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated, or otherwise used without the express written approval of the author, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

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Table of Contents

Fantasy Baseball for Smart People: How to Profit Big During MLB Season

I. This Is My Intro

My daily fantasy baseball philosophy

Why and how you should embrace variance

Using game theory in daily fantasy sports

How ‘antifragility’ applies to DFS

II. Perfecting the Process: How (and What) to Research for Daily Fantasy Baseball

Which stats matter most for pitchers/batters

Understanding splits

Where to find relevant information on stats, weather, lineups, Vegas lines, and more

How to conduct your own daily fantasy baseball research

III. Cash Games vs Tournaments: How to Win Different League Types

How to maximize the odds of winning in cash games

How to understand upside to win tournaments

Using player ownership to win large GPPs

Player consistency stats

IV. Chasing Dongs: Selecting Batters in Daily Fantasy Baseball

Maximizing the probability of home runs

Which stats matter for base-stealers

How to use batted ball profiles to your advantage

How batting order affects success in cash games versus GPPs

V. An Arms Race: Selecting Pitchers in Daily Fantasy Baseball

Emphasizing consistency to select the right pitchers

How to predict strikeouts

Understanding pitcher ownership for tournament success

When to go cheap on your arms

VI. Data, So Hot Right Now, Data

How game start times affect usage

How DraftKings production compares for home/away teams

Which teams are the most successful to stack

The best offenses versus lefties/righties

VII. The Jonathan Bales Chapter of General Daily Fantasy Baseball Heuristics for Daily Fantasy Baseball Players Who Can’t Play Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too

56 Rules to Follow for daily fantasy baseball success

VIII. Sample from Daily Fantasy Pros Reveal Their Money-Making Secrets

An excerpt on how to use the Vegas lines

Postface

Chapter I: This Is My Intro

"Both poker and investing (and daily fantasy sports) are games of incomplete information. You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical."

David Einhorn

This is the 11th book in my Fantasy Football for Smart People book series. I guess it’s now the Fantasy SPORTS for Smart People series since, for the first time, I’m writing a book that doesn’t have any football content. But yeah, 11 books in a pretty small niche—a reflection of how much time I spend researching fantasy sports, sure, but also a testament to how little of a life I have. One man’s lack of social skills are another man’s in-depth fantasy sports analysis.

I gained worldwide house-wide fame for my fantasy football analysis, but fantasy baseball is my favorite sport to play. Not season-long fantasy baseball—that shit sucks—but daily fantasy baseball. Not only does the nature of the game and scoring make it exhilarating to follow, but the day-to-day grind can be leveraged into huge profits. NFL for the show, MLB for the dough.

In 2014, I was lucky enough to qualify for the DraftKings Fantasy Baseball Championship in the Bahamas, where I crushed a field of 50 to finish 22nd. Too bad it wasn’t a 50/50. I still won a nice chunk of cash for that finish and, luckily, I made some equity swaps that put me on the right side of variance. So that was fun.

If two years ago was a learning period and last season was one for profitability, I think this upcoming season is really a massive opportunity to dominate in daily fantasy baseball. That sentiment really applies to anyone who is willing to put in the time to research and improve. Hopefully this book can be a step in that journey for you.

Like my book Fantasy Football (and Baseball) for Smart People, this book is going to be extremely data-driven. Once again, I’ve worked with DraftKings to uncover what’s really winning daily fantasy baseball leagues: which strategies are winning cash games, how to approach tournaments, the optimal salary cap distribution, how much ownership affects win rates, and so much more really cool stuff. I think DraftKings has continually been an innovator in the daily fantasy sports industry, so a big thank you to the guys over there (specifically Rick Sawyer) for being such an integral part of the creation of this book.

Jonathan Bales, Author of Fantasy SPORTS for Smart People and Founder of RotoAcademy

How to Get the Most Out of This Book (Plus FREE CRAP)

Speaking of DraftKings, I have been working with them more and more over the past year. I’m now a DraftKings Pro, and I’m really happy to be able to offer some pretty cool deals to my readers. I think you’re going to get a lot of value out of this book, but my goal is of course to convert you into a long-term subscriber. To help do that, here are some bonuses/offers/free crap.

100% Deposit Bonus on DraftKings

If you sign up and deposit on DraftKings through one of the links in this book, you’ll immediately get a 100% deposit bonus up to $600. That’s up to $600 for free just for signing up and depositing at www.draftkings.com/r/bales.

Free Daily Fantasy Baseball Package

Perhaps the sickest freebie I’m offering is my Daily Fantasy Baseball Package. Filled with my favorite plays, best stacks, HR/K Predictors—basically all of my day-to-day MLB research—you can buy the package straight up, OR you can get it completely for free by signing up and depositing on DraftKings. That’s a 100% deposit bonus and a $199.99 daily fantasy baseball package for free just for signing up and depositing through a link in this book.

Note: If you sign up and deposit, email me at [e-mail] (or tweet me at @BalesFootball) to claim your free daily fantasy baseball package.

10% Off Everything On My Site (Books, DFS Packages, Etc)

If you want to purchase my Daily Fantasy Baseball Package or any of the books in my Fantasy Sports for Smart People book series, you can do that on my personal site. If you head over there, use the coupon code Smart10 at checkout to get 10% off your entire order.

Free Issue of RotoAcademy—My Daily Fantasy Sports Training School

Finally, I’m also giving away a free issue—12 lessons—from my daily fantasy sports training school RotoAcademy. I founded RotoAcademy to bridge the gap between the average daily fantasy sports player and the game's elite. My goal is to teach you the tricks of the trade—and give you all kinds of unique data on what's actually winning leagues (like what’s in this book)—to help you become a profitable DFS player.

Download the free lessons at RotoAcademy.com/free-download/ or visit RotoAcademy.com/about-faq/ to learn more.

My Daily Fantasy Baseball Philosophy

Sporting events are difficult to predict—even more so on the individual level than the team level—and baseball is arguably the most challenging from day to day. Though there’s a ton of consistency in MLB stats over the course of an entire 162-game season (which we can leverage from night to night), it’s just damn tough to predict how a player is going to perform in a single baseball game.

If you think about the variance in baseball just from a broad perspective, that idea should be pretty obvious. Even common events in baseball, like singles or strikeouts, are still relatively low-frequency; the top batters in the world can barely get a hit in 30 percent of their at-bats.

Further, there’s not a huge deviation in players’ stats. Only a handful of players have a .300 average each year, yet the league average for batting average typically hovers just above .250. So we’re talking about a five-percentage-point difference between an average player and the game’s best over the course of an entire season that we need to predict each day.

Don’t Run From Variance

But guess what? I don’t mind this variance. Actually, I think the biggest hurdle you must overcome to establish yourself as an elite (and profitable) daily fantasy player is to not only tolerate variance, but to embrace and utilize it.

That’s important is because volatility does not equal unpredictability, nor does it equate to the lack of a competitive edge for daily fantasy players. Let me bold that sentence and type it again: volatility does not equal unpredictability, nor does it equate to the lack of a competitive edge for daily fantasy players.

Let me use an example of why I believe this is the case. I got a dartboard for Christmas. I started playing the other day and I’m absolutely awful—like my-wall-looks-like-it-was-in-a-gunfight-with-ant-sized-bullets bad. I was going to go with a Swiss cheese metaphor there but Swiss cheese is just terribly overused as the default there-are-holes-in-something analogy. So yeah, ant-sized bullets.

Moving on.

So I suck horribly at darts. On any single throw, you have little idea if I’m going to hit a triple 20 or throw it into the TV. To say there’s a lot of variance in my dart-throwing results is an understatement.

But the other day I was looking at the board and noticed something cool: all of the numbered areas (do those have an official name?) have more or less the same number of holes in them. I actually started to count the total number of holes in each area, and the similarities were pretty incredible. Even though I’m always aiming for the bullseye because I don’t know any other games and despite the lack of predictability on each individual throw, there’s astonishing consistency over large samples; if I throw 10,000 darts at that board, there will probably be somewhere around 500 throws into each of the 20 areas, assuming each toss has an equal chance of landing in each spot.

Reason No. 1 that volatility doesn’t equate to unpredictability: high-variance events can (almost paradoxically) be extremely predictable over the long run. Though I don’t have a strong grasp on whether Clayton Kershaw will whiff three or nine batters in his next outing, I can say that he’s extremely likely to sit down between 8.0 and 10.5 hitters per nine innings this season—and most likely somewhere around 9.5. The point is that events with a lot of short-term variance and unpredictability can also be very consistent if we give them enough time.

But what about creating an edge? If predicting baseball outcomes is so difficult on the daily level, how is it possible to leverage player performances into profit? The main reason is that daily fantasy baseball exists as a marketplace. Sites like DraftKings create player salaries and users pick certain players at different rates. And for the most part, I’m of the belief that both daily fantasy sites and daily fantasy players react to events that contain a lot of noise as if there’s something there that’s more meaningful than what exists in reality.

Ultimately, if you have players priced as if there’s less variance than there is, you’ll be able to find value. Further, if you have daily fantasy players reacting to those salaries as if there’s less variance than there is, then the market will be inefficient (and thus beatable). And that’s really what I believe we have in daily fantasy baseball: a market with wild shifts in price and perceived value that’s based on a