Hey everyone!  In case you missed it, I made my debut here at DFSEdge yesterday, giving you my “Strong Plays” for the day’s game.  In addition to providing twice-weekly “Strong Plays,” however, I’ll also be talking about some of the strategies and concepts that are important to consider when drafting your team each day.  Regardless of which daily game site you play on, these concepts should inform your decision-making and the way you approach daily games in general.  There are a lot of misconceptions out there as to which data is useful and how to properly use it, and I hope to cast some light on previously unknown phenomena and some doubt on previously held general wisdom.

Let’s start from the beginning.  One of the most important things to consider when drafting your team each day is the platoon advantage—that is to say, whom the combination of the batter and the pitcher’s handedness favors. (Note: If you understand what the platoon advantage is, feel free to skip down a few paragraphs).  You’ll often hear terms like LOOGY in baseball circles, standing for Left-Handed One Out Guy.  You see, pitchers are better at retiring batters of the same handedness.  Lefties fare well against lefties, and righties fare better against righties.  This has to do with things like arm angle and the way different pitches move, but regardless of the reasons, the results have been born out over many, many years. And, of course, it works in reverse for batters; lefties hit better against righties and visa-versa.

Take a look at the following table, which gives a variety of stats either with or without the platoon advantage (from the batter’s perspective—just reverse it for pitchers).



As you can see, batters pick up a 5-to-10 percent boost in all of the triple-slash categories and quite a bit more when it comes to strikeouts and walks.  As a result, it’s wise to fill your daily league teams predominantly with batters who have the platoon advantage.  Since most pitchers are right-handed, that means you’ll usually be stocking your teams with lefties.

It’s harder to take advantage of this when selecting your pitcher for the day since the lineups of most teams are pretty uniform when it comes to righty/lefty composition (and since teams know the pitcher’s handedness ahead of time and adjust their lineups accordingly), but it’s worth a look in case the opposing team happens to be same-handedness-heavy.

Okay, now that the basics have been covered, let’s move on to the interesting part about platoons and their application to daily games that most people probably don’t realize.  Take a look at these two players available on FanDuel for tomorrow’s contests and tell me, absent other information, which you prefer:



For all intents and purposes, these two players are equals.  They have played the same number of games at nearly identical levels of production, stand in the same spot when in the field, and cost the same amount of money to draft to your team.  I’ve left their names out because they’re really not important.  Everyone has their own biases, liking certain players better than others, but that’s not what we’re getting at here. Ignoring these individual eccentricities that we all possess (and possibilities like one of the players over or underperforming his true talent level), you’d probably just call this a wash.  Flip a coin and decide from there who to draft.  Let me add two more columns of data, though, and tell me if your opinion changes:



For me, the choice is now crystal clear.  Consider this: in every single at-bat that Player A has taken this year, he has had the platoon advantage.  As a switch-hitter, he has the option of deciding the side of the plate on which to stand based on the pitcher’s handedness.  As we’ve already discussed, this can make a sizeable difference in his performance.

So then switch hitters are the ideal daily league candidates, right?  If they always have the platoon advantage, they’re always going to perform better than an equally-skilled player that doesn’t.  But that’s not looking at all of the variables.  In fact, in this example, I’m taking Player B—the non-switch hitter—for my team and not looking back.

You see, the average right-handed hitter (i.e. Player B) takes 70% of his at-bats against right-handed pitching—without the platoon advantage.  The remaining 30 percent are taken against lefties—with the platoon advantage.  So Player B has actually accumulated 2.4 points per game while at a disadvantage more than two-thirds of the time.  In this game, however, Player B has the platoon factor working in his favor.  So while Player A has scored 2.5 points per game after considering the platoon advantage, Player B has scored 2.4 points per game before we consider the platoon.  In other words, with the platoon advantage, he must be better than a 2.4 point-per-game player!  Exactly how much better will depend on the scoring system of the league in question and his own individual platoon tendencies, but these are topics unto themselves, better saved for another day.  For now, it’s enough just to keep in mind this hierarchy when deciding which players to draft to your teams:

1. Batter of Dedicated Handedness with the Platoon Advantage
2. Switch Hitter
3. Batter of Dedicated Handedness without the Platoon Advantage

(Oh, and if you were wondering, Player A is Pablo Sandoval and Player B is Todd Frazier.)