Daily Fantasy Baseball Strategy for FanDuel and DraftKings – Pitcher Wins

Daily Fantasy Baseball Strategy for FanDuel and DraftKings - Pitcher Wins Can you believe it? Baseball season is almost here and with it comes months of waiting for that Coors lineup to post, sweating out weather reports, stacking against David Holmberg and everything else that makes the summer great. At DFSR we're going to lead into baseball season with some strategy articles to get your mind spinning on all the nuances that comes with daily fantasy baseball lineups. If you want a lot of these ideas condensed into one place, make sure to download a copy of our free baseball eBook. There's a nice shiny link below. And while you wait for MLB, you can get a jump start on our membership package. Right now we've got projections for NBA and NHL running everyday and FanDuel and DraftKings NBA Optimal Lineups in our DFSR Pro package. Click here to get started. Now let's start looking at the baseball season. Calculating a Pitchers Expected Win The ever-elusive win. Many sites have it weighted in such a way that the simple W can swing your team in and out of the money quickly (I suppose the HR has the same effect). So we need a functional and realistic way to determine pitcher win expectancy. The Vegas money line gives us some indication of how much the nerds in Sin City think a certain team will win the game. And Vegas being smart and all, I think we can trust money lines almost as much as any other predictive measurement. A -200 line for a dude like Clayton Kershaw against say the Giants tells us roughly that the Dodgers are a 66% favorite to win the game. But unfortunately can’t just give the whole win to the blonde beauty Clayton. A team’s win, while likely to go to a starting pitcher, isn’t his to own. The Hardball Times did some research back in 2009 into how often a starting pitcher accounts for a team’s win. With this in mind we went and looked at the trends over the last two years. In that last two seasons we’ve seen (via FanGraphs) that in a given game, a starting pitcher will get the win about 75% of the time. A single starting pitcher, if all things are equal, can expect to get a win about 37.5% of the time. That means in an evenly matched scenario on FanDuel, a pitcher walks into a game with only 4.5 expected win points.  Just getting started with MLB DFS? Click the banner below to get rolling   But seeing as how not all starting pitchers are created equally (I’m looking at you Nick Martinez) and games are...