MLB – Industry Expert Grading

Spring has sprung and baseball is back! The MLB grind began this week and will give us something to look forward to on a daily basis until football rolls around again.  The first couple of weeks will prove to be a bit tricky for the Consensus article and Lineup Construction. With so many day games and split slates, we will likely concentrate on the night slates. Once the season gets going, we will get into a groove and will only play night slates. Can one of the mega sites that throw out a high volume of picks finish towards the top?

In this article, I will give a brief recap of each day we gathered and graded the experts, including how the Industry Consensus picks did, highlighting which experts were at the top for the day and which players were only called out by one or two experts, but produced an “A+” grade. We will also review the overall standings and highlight the top experts so far this season. And finally, I will publish results of our Lineup Construction series.

As a reminder, we are currently gathering selections and publishing the MLB Industry Consensus articles and MLB Consensus Lineup Construction articles each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday during the season, so be sure to check back about an hour or so before the first pitch of the first game to get a look at the consensus picks and sample lineups for the day.

Overall Leaderboard

It’s still early but I’ll go ahead and lay out who performed the best in week one.

#1) Daily Overlay – BvP for MVP (Score: 3.74) takes the top spot for the first week. Stephen showed flashes of brilliance last MLB season with his BvP article and he’s off on the right foot in 2016.

#2) Daily Overlay – On the Hill (Score: 3.47) makes it a clean sweep for our in-house writers this week. “On the Hill” is a new article to the fold this season from our own Brad Richter. Brad provides his pitching analysis on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

#3) FantasyWired (Score: 3.35) just edged out Scout to earn a place in the top-3 after one week. Let’s keep an eye on them as things progress this year as they are new to our MLB coverage.

Week in Review

Monday (April 4th)

Opening Day brought a middle of the road start to the season for the experts. Four of our twelve experts scored a 4.0 or higher. We graded both the early and late slates for the day.

Industry Consensus Picks
The Industry Consensus finished in the middle of the pack with a 8th place ranking out of 13 experts graded posting a ho-hum DailyOverlay score of 3.26 for the day.

A+ – Bryce Harper, Denard Span, Daniel Murphy, Buster Posey, Brandon Belt
F – Brian Dozier, Miguel Sano, Ben Revere, Eugenio Suarez, Maikel Franco, Ketel Marte, Nelson Cruz, Devin Mesoraco

Top Experts of the Day
#1) FantasyWired (Score: 6.67) grabbed the top spot for the day. Only three total selections and two (Posey and Harper) scored an “A+”.

#2) DailyRoto (Score: 5.11) came home with a 2nd place finish on opening day that included two “A+” grades for the Giants tandem of Denard Span and Brandon Belt.

Sleepers of the Day
A+ – Mark Trumbo (Scout)

Tuesday (April 5th)

Tuesday brough about another ho-hum day for the experts. Stephen was the only expert to break the 5.0 mark with his BvP plays.

Industry Consensus Picks
The Industry Consensus had another middle of the road day coming in 7th place out of 14 experts graded with a DailyOverlay score of 3.10.

A+ – Scott Kazmir, Ian Kinsler, Jean Segura, Paul Goldschmidt, Nelson Cruz
F – Derek Norris, Brandon Belt, Ketel Marte, Kris Bryant, Nick Catellanos, Michael Wacha, Buster Posey, Miguel Cabrera, Ben Zobrist, Danny Valencia, Rougned Odor

Top Experts of the Day
#1) Daily Overlay BvP for MVP (Score: 5.33) tops the list with four of his six selection scoring an “A” or higher, highlighted by a sly Jedd Gyorko play. Gyorko dropped a bomb on his way to that “A+” grade.

#2) Scout Fantasy (Score: 4.38) comes in second dropping 13 picks for an “A” or better of their overall 24 selections. Surprisingly, they were the only expert to play Rizzo and were the only expert other than Stephen to play Gyorko and Gregory Polanco.

Sleepers of the Day
A+ – Anthony Rizzo (Scout)
A+ – Dexter Fowler (DailyFantasySportsRankings.com)
A+ – Jedd Gyorko (DO BvP for MVP, Scout)
A+ – Gregory Polanco (DO BvP for MVP, Scout)
A+ – Aaron Sanchez (Scout, Fantasy Alarm)

Wednesday (April 6th)

From ho-hum to poor for the experts on Wednesday. Only four of our fourteen graded experts finished with a Daily Overlay score above 3.0.

Industry Consensus Picks
The Industry Consensus performed poorly as well on Wednesday. A score of 2.25 puts the Consensus in 10th of 14 experts. Prepare yourself for a long list of “F’s” below.

A+ – Brian McCann, Chris Davis, Carlos Correa
F – Daniel Murphy, Brian Dozier, Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, Adam Jones, Miguel Sano, Michael Pineda, Corey Seager, Zack Cozart, Jay Bruce, Matt Carpenter, Freddie Freeman

Top Experts of the Day
#1) Moxyball – Cheat Sheet (Score: 5.50) brought home the hardware on Wednesday. Moxyball scored quite well last season in our pitcher selections. Only four picks but two “A+’s” will garner you the top spot.

#2) FantasyTeamAdvice (Score: 4.40) came in 2nd on the day. Similar to Moxyball, they only made five selections and two scored an “A+”.

Sleepers of the Day

A+ – Maikel Franco (DailyRoto, Fantasy Alarm)
A+ – Eugenio Suarez (DailyRoto)
A+ – Yasiel Puig (Fantasy Alarm, RotoGrinders Consensus)
A+ – Mark Teixeira (RotoGrinders Consensus, Rotocurve)
A+ – Trevor Plouffe (RotoGrinders Consensus)
A+ – Brandon Finnegan (Daily Overlay On the Hill)
A+ – Aaron Nola (Moxyball – Cheat Sheet, FantasyTeamAdvice)

Friday (April 8th)

Just a flat out horrible day for the experts. Two experts finished at 3.00 and that was the top score of the day.

Industry Consensus Picks
The Consensus was one of those two that finished at 3.0. Even with 12 of the 22 picks finishing with an “F”, the Consensus still managed to top the board though I’m not sure “topping the board” is a phrase that should be used in this case.

A+ – Jean Segura, Josh Donaldson, Starling Marte, Scooter Gennett, Chris Tillman
F – Jonathan Lucroy, John Jaso, Ben Zobrist, Kris Bryant, Matt Carpenter, Chris Archer, Francisco Liriano, Nelson Cruz, Adrian Gonzalez, Corey Seager, David Peralta

Top Experts of the Day
#1) Daily Overlay – On the Hill (Score: 3.00) finished off the week with the top spot. Even with two of Brad’s four picks scoring an “F”, the “A+” from Chris Tillman helped a ton.

#2) Daily Overlay Industry Consensus (Score: 3.00) pulled in a co-champ trophy on Friday. As I said above, twelve of the 22 picks finished with failing grades.

Sleepers of the Day
A+ – Chris Davis (DailyRoto)
A+ – Brock Holt (Scout)
A+ – Ryan Braun (Scout)

Consensus Lineup Construction Review

This was our first week of building MLB lineups. This is the same thing that we did for the NBA. We liked it so we brought it over to MLB. Good thing we did! We shot out of the gate like we had a rocket strapped on our back. Brad handled the DraftKings lineups and got off to a bit of a slow start but…boy did he make up for it on Friday. Stephen and I handled the FanDuel side of things and both fared well.

Here is a list of the “rules” we are following when constructing lineups:

1. Matt will make two separate lineups for FanDuel and Brad will do the same for DraftKings, one for Cash games and one for GPP tournaments. Stephen will contribute a FanDuel lineup when the urge strikes him.
2. For Cash games, we will build our entire lineup from the Consensus list using any player listed regardless of what tier they are in. This was a bit difficult this week with some of the split slates. If we have to go off the board for Cash, we will make sure to use a player that was picked by at least one expert.
3. For GPP games, we are allowed to choose up to two players that are not on the Consensus list.
4. We can modify any lineup as we see fit for any late-breaking news updates that open up good options even if they are not on the Consensus list. I used this option on Friday with a late minute switch when Posey was not in the lineup and the weather in Cincy scared me a bit.

Weekly/Overall Results

FanDuel

Overall, a very solid start to the week for Stephen and I on FanDuel. We were able to profit every day in the Cash games. The GPP was not as successful but a good start to the week on Monday and Tuesday still allowed us to be profitable for the week.

DraftKings

As I said before, it took Brad a bit to get going this week. He finished in the money two of the five slates in the Cash game. His GPP lineups only cashed once but it was a big one!

The grid below shows a recap of the results for the week. A very solid start to the MLB season from your pals here at Daily Overlay. Let’s see if these results can keep up. Overall, we had a solid 65.9% ROI. We arrived at that number by taking very different paths. Stephen and I had very consistent weeks on FanDuel while Brad started slow and finished with a bang on DraftKings!

Ownership Percentage Tracking

Just as Brad did for the NBA, we will track the ownership percentages for MLB. A part of daily fantasy sports strategy is understanding ownership percentages and being able to predict ownership percentages prior to entering contests especially for GPP tournaments where you might want to be contrarian by selecting lower owned players or fading highly owned players depending on the payout structure and size of the contest.

We had a hypothesis at DailyOverlay that we could utilize the Industry Consensus list to help predict ownership percentages with the assumption being that players who were selected by more experts would likely be higher owned picks in Cash and GPP tournaments.

Below is the current table showing the data we have tracked this first week. Results are using DraftKings Double-Up or 50/50s for Cash and large field multi-entry tournaments for GPP. The Count column shows the number of times a player was selected by the experts for a given day. The Cash % column shows the average ownership percentage of those players in a Cash game. The GPP % column shows the average ownership percentage of those players in a GPP tournament. The Total column shows the number of occurrences that a player was selected that many times.

We tracked ownership percentages in the NBA and our original hypothesis appeared to be correct that DFS players can use the Industry Consensus list to help them predict ownership percentages for the NBA. That being said, we think this will translate to the MLB, hence the reason we will track ownership percentages here. We will continue to track and monitor this. As long as the data provides some good insight, we will provide this data.