Now that I’m super cool and running in daily fantasy circles, I find myself discussing players and strategies with various people, which can lead to an interesting exchange of ideas.  One idea that someone mentioned to me recently was how it might be wise to target hitters on the road.  While the home team is entitled to last licks, if they hold the lead through the top half of the ninth inning, the bottom half of the inning doesn’t get played, robbing a minimum of three hitters an extra plate appearance and a chance to produce additional fantasy points.  Hitters on the road, however, will always play the ninth inning.

This sounded like a good theory to me, so I decided to run the numbers.  Using a six-year period of recent data, I looked at all batters with at least 3 plate appearances in a game (to weed out, as best I could, pinch-hitters and other such mid-game replacements) and, as we expected, found that hitters on the road did indeed accrue more plate appearances than the home team’s batters.  The difference isn’t enormous — 4.3 PAs per game for away hitters; 4.1 PAs per game for home hitters — but it is there.

Of course, there is one assumption we’re still making here: that extra plate appearances lead to extra production.  It makes logical sense, but let’s make sure.  Below, you’ll find a table with the average points per game (PPG) for each of the eight major daily fantasy sites broken down by Home and Away batters.



Well that’s weird.  Did I input the wrong set of data in each row?  It looks like away hitters get that PA boost but that home hitters actually perform better across the board, on every single daily site.  How could that be?  When I first saw this result, I thought there had to be something wrong with my query, that I’d somehow miscalculated and that the rows were reversed or wrong entirely.  Then I realized what was going on.  Check out this table and see if you can figure it out:



It’s home-field advantage!  On a per-at-bat basis, hitters just perform better in general at home than on the road.  We’ll discuss home-field advantage in more detail at a later date, but we can clearly see that even if away hitters get that extra plate appearance boost, home-field advantage negates the advantage and makes the home hitters better bets… at least on average.

You see, on average, the road hitters only get an extra two-tenths of a plate appearance.  But in reality, there is no such thing as a fractional plate appearance.  Hitters either get an extra time at bat or they don’t. Eighty percent of the time, they won’t get anything extra, but 20 percent of the time they’ll get one full opportunity for added production.  Let’s take a look at one more table looking at how an extra plate appearance alters a player’s value:

	PA	FanDuel	Draft Street	Fantasy Feud	Daily Joust	Fan Throwdown	Draft Kings	Star Street	Draft Day
Away	5	2.8	6.0	5.5	6.8	3.9	10.8	5.8	7.3
Home	4	2.4	4.8	4.4	5.4	3.1	8.6	4.8	5.8
Difference	1	0.4	1.2	1.1	1.4	0.8	2.3	1.0	1.5

While home hitters are better on a per-at-bat basis, away hitters are definitely the better play if they wind up getting that extra time at the plate.  The odds are against it, but if you’re playing in a competition against a large number of opponents, say in a tournament, embracing risk and volatility is a wise strategy (as we’ve discussed before).  This is one more way of doing that.