Study: waiver wire fantasy baseball strategy during the regular season
When you take a step back, block out the social media noise and think about it, analyzing baseball – a game measured in black and white, wins and losses – comes with it many nuanced layers. It’s quite the “Choose Your Own Adventure” of analysis. Do you want to focus on hitting or pitching today? Do you want to stress the importance of bunting and getting the run over or using brute force with big boppers in the lineup?
The same holds true of fantasy baseball draft prep and execution ahead of regular season waiver wire strategy. We spend so much of February and March trying to concoct the perfect draft strategy focusing on the players who may lead us to victory, but what-if – for just a second – we reverse engineer our way of thinking slightly. What-if, instead of thinking first of THE PLAYER, we prioritized the ROTO CATEGORY that gives us the best shot to win our league?
FOX Sports fantasy department data analyst Zach Malosh and I hopped back down the rabbit hole to analyze three-year trends tied to roto category strategy success. We looked at the following sample size on FOXSports.com:
- 2013-2015 fantasy baseball seasons
- 10-team public leagues
- 5x5 standard roto, standard rosters
- Online LIVE Drafts
When consuming the following information, remember the layered nuance of analyzing baseball. The following game data facts allow for personal interpretation and conclusions to be drawn, but are not black and white answers to winning fantasy baseball. They are a helpful guide where owners should focus on the frequency of the trends resulting in positive results at season’s end.
With that said, our first infographic illustrates how often a first place fantasy baseball owner finished first or second in specific categories.
So, for example, 72 percent of owners who finished first in their league also finished in the top two in runs scored. One could infer three out of four successfully focused on runs scored accumulation, which led to a higher likelihood of first place success.
On the flip side, only 36 percent of owners who finished first in their league also finished in the top two in batting average (not pictured). In other words, 64 percent of the time, owners who finished first in the standings, finished 3rd-10th place in batting average - thus placing less urgency to place atop the average 5x5 category.
The second infographic comes with it the same black label notice. The percentages are facts of frequency and not a yellow brick road to success.
Note: the above graph is an illustration of the correlation between the two stats (+/- 3 percent) from 2013-2015. In other words, 60.4 percent of the time when owners improved their ERA, they improved your WHIP over the past three fantasy seasons. Read previous sentence again and again until it sticks.
For example, if you are targeting a pitcher on the waiver wire to help your ERA – 60.4 percent of the time, you are likely going to help your WHIP in the process. That’s because 60.4 percent of the time an owner finished first in ERA, they fininshed first in WHIP (or vice versa). So, by default, targeting one category on the waiver wire should help the other category 60 percent of the time if the trend holds.
The correlation between HR and RBI/Runs seems obvious, right? Given the fact that every home run also produces at least one RBI and Run. This is not groundbreaking evidence. However, as a reminder, this graphic is to inform that 57.1 percent of the time owners finished first in HR, they also finished first in RBI – and vice versa - in 5x5 roto leagues.
Malosh Deep Cut Data: there were 60,663 runs scored in the regular season over the last three years. There were 13,756 HR. On plays involving a HR, there were 21,463 RBI. That means that 21,463/60,663, or approximately 35.4 percent, of RBI over the past three years were batted in via homers.
