Friday, April 10, 2009

Favorable Matchups - MLB Schedule 4/10

One of things I'll be trying to do here is alert you to teams and players with particularly favorable upcoming matchups. That should give you a big edge in daily contests and other fantasy baseball formats with daily transactions.

One thing to keep in mind is that a matchup may not affect all players equally. When Chris Young comes to town, that's not a great matchup for most Mets hitters, because of his high strikeout rate. But things couldn't be better for Jose Reyes, since Young is absurdly easy to steal bases against. There are other factors (such as handedness and pitching style) that can influence individual hitters differently as well. So there are going to be times when I'll identify a team that generally has a good matchup, and other times when I'll identify specific players.

Overall, for today's games it appears that the two big winners on the hitting side are the White Sox and Phillies. Both play in hitters parks against bad starting pitchers. The White Sox have the added bonus of home field advantage. On the pitching side, the top two picks in most formats should be Lowe and Harden. Which comes out on top in the rankings depends on the scoring system, since they have such different styles.

Thanks to a pitching at home in a pitcher's park against a bad offense and a bad opposing starting pitcher, Shawn Hill is an excellent bargain who should be available cheap in almost any format. In fact, in some formats he's not far below Lowe and Harden for today's games! Padres relievers are worth targeting as well...in fact home field advantage is greater for relievers, because the home team always has to pitch a full nine innings, providing them with more opportunity than visiting relievers.

3 comments:

Chet said...

Thanks! This kind of stuff is great. I really like Draft Bug. Keep up the good work!

Crunch Bunch said...

Good stuff although I'm going with Zito tonight in draftbug's freeroll. He was only 80 pts and the Padres are one of the few teams that he has done "well" against in the NL. Note however that I'm using him in a freeroll and not with actual $ (I can only back Zito so much)

The Giants hit pretty well in the opening series so they may not be as bad as everyone thinks.

Scott Berger said...

What is the current thinking on BEDARD?