That being said, this thread is not about getting a daily game in the NFBC. I’d like to see it eventually, but I ain’t pushing for it. This thread is about what lessons can be learned from participating in a daily game.
Lesson number one is about studying your pitchers. It is very similar to betting on baseball because you live and die by pitching. The single biggest misconception that weekly game players have is that if you are playing a daily game then you just have to drop and add new starting pitchers everyday (i.e. streaming pitchers). WRONG!!! That will kill you in a daily game.
Running up a lot of innings early on with a high ERA and WHIP are the death of many teams. In both the daily and weekly game, you need to pace your early innings with low ERA and WHIP guys. Later in the season when you have solidified your averages you can begin chasing after the discrete categories.
The only real differences between pitching in the daily and weekly games are studying pitchers on a daily basis and the elimination of the two-turn pitcher concept. Since pitching information is the most accurate the day before or the day of a game, it makes picking the pitchers a little easier. When studying pitchers for the weekly game you need to be able to forecast.
You will need to look for the number of match-ups that you have during the week. You need to especially look for two-turn pitchers. Then look at who it is that your pitchers are going up against. A great resource for this analysis is Yahoo. Once you have a list of your possible pitchers, where they’re pitching, and who they’re pitching against, you can search Yahoo’s database for the player. The player card will give you a wide variety of detailed information about the player. Most importantly it gives you a great breakdown of each pitcher against the opposing team for that week.
It seems that many people tend to look at pitching as a mystery. Draft the best ones that you can, grab two-turn pitchers out of the pool, plug ‘em in, and then pray! That is just plain ol’ bad gambling technique. Research your pitchers thoroughly for the week. Get a list of what pitchers you have coming up for the week, find some good data on the match-ups, and then make your decisions about who to put in. With pitching you need to optimize your innings, not maximize.
The second lesson is about hitting. It is the reverse of pitching. Here you need to maximize opportunities. The more at-bats you have the better chance you have of gaining stats. In a mixed league game, one of the worst situations that you can have is a player who is getting less than five games in a week. Platoon players and pinch-hitters have very little value. Take Tony Clark over the past few years. Great stats. If he had had a permanent starting position he would have been worth having. But he kept racking up very good numbers and he sat in most everyone’s FA pool. He just wasn’t given enough at-bats to make him worth having, not even on someone’s bench.
Sometimes you have no-brainers, like playing a 5-game A-Rod vs. playing a 7-game Casey Blake. Sometimes they are tougher, like a 6-game Jorge Cantu vs. a 7-game Casey Blake. In most cases though, you should focus on the player who is going to get the most plate appearances. More plate appearances equals more chances at gaining discrete stats. It may hurt your batting average somewhat, but that is one category against four that you can gain in.
But then why is it better to maximize your hitting opportunities while optimizing your pitching opportunities?
Well, mainly because of the difference in discrete and continuous numbers. Discrete numbers are counting numbers, like 1, 2, 3, etc. Continuous numbers are your averages, ERA, WHIP, and BA. In your discrete categories you can either go up or stall. There is no going backwards. For your hitters you can only negatively affect one category by maximizing your opportunities, and that is batting average. With pitchers there are two categories that can be negatively affected, and if one of those categories is hit hard then the probability of the other getting hit hard is extremely high.
It is also because of the way the fantasy gods set the game up. A hitter can contribute to five categories when he comes to the plate. Take a pitcher though. Depending on his role, he really only affects four categories when he plays. The risk of streaming pitchers is much greater than the possible reward. For hitters, the risk is much less.
You guys should check out eBay's Feedback Discussion Board if you want some good conspiracy reading
. They just changed their feedback rules so that sellers can't leave negative feedback for buyers. It is almost as good as what we had in here about the free agent pool... Almost, I said, almost 