Fantasy baseball, IPA's, bandwagon fans, and more...

listening to the Fantasy Sports Radio Network. Did let me just become best friends? Fantasy best Friends forever? All right, let's do this. Welcome inside Studio thirty four, the Fantasy best Friends Forever. Oh, Greg, justus me. Frank stand will shout out to Greggy, who's lounging out there in Florida right now? A little bit better weather. Here you go, live live shot of Greig something. You know, I just thought i'd let's just get it in there, you know,

right off the top of the show. Here that is a legit shot that Greg has sent me of himself lounging in Florida. Um, yeah, it's sunny there, eight plus degrees. We're here in New York City. We're here in New York City. Who's we I mean Frank's you know he's alone. There's no Greg. Did you bringing another best friend? Well, we're about to find out, because as much as I like Greg, he's cool. He's a good guy in the presence of greatness a millionaire. Drew nick Myer of Daily

Breau dot Com is here in studio live through. First of all, I have to ask you, how did you sleep last night? Second of all, how are you enjoying the snow? I'm I'm not enjoying the snow because I'm in the studio. I don't have no intention of leaving the studio or this hotel today and battling that snow outside. I did sleep great last night. Uh surprisingly none. None

of the city noise had any effect on me. I guess I'm a custom from from visiting friends up here that the sirens going by in the middle of the night don't bother me. Make sure you follow Drew at Drew dink Meyer over on Twitter. Yeah, so basically you and Greg just swapped spots because normally you're from You're from Fort lauda day, You're you're always in Florida. You enjoyed the weather all year round. Now we're here in New York and snow and yeah, he went there to

go visit his mom. He's hanging out. This was a shot from yesterday on his birthday. He turned fifty yesterday. We found out Greg sucks a little bit older than the rest of us. But you know, he was enjoying a nice little fruity beverage. So there you go, Greg Susman out there in Florida and we're here still holding down the fort. It's snowing and it's a good time here with Drew dink Meyer live in studio. So my plan for today was kind of an intro to MLB dfs.

How does it differ from all the other dfs forwards basketball football. You hear the word variance a lot when talking about MLB d dfs, and you know, I think, obviously a single game slate or days slate worth of MLB dfs, it's really a microcosm of like the season long that we play. There's a lot of luck involved, like you see, and we talked about it with starting pitchers. We look at the r A indicators. Um, I think

Aaron Nola. You look at his year by year production, perfect example right where like not much changes year in and year out if you look like deeper on Aaron Nola, but as e r A fluctuates from like four point five to like last year when it was sub three. So there's a lot of luck. There's there's definitely a luck factor involved with baseball, I would say more so than any other fantasy sports. So we're gonna talk about that variance and how that kind of works itself into

MLB dfs. We're also gonna get to know Drew dick Meyer because I have some questions. I had a few people downstairs give me questions that they want to ask you dick Meyer, because frankly you dick Meyer is a mystery man, so we gotta find out more about him. You know, let's just let's do this right off the top. Two. What is your favorite beverage? First? We'll start with non alcoholic for the for the under twenty one audience out there, and then give us your favorite alcoholic beverage. If you're

not a big drinker, that's fine. So my favorite my favorite beverage that's non alcoholic used to be pepsi. But if I cut out soda from from my life, now made some made some health improvements. So uh, now I will go with h A smoothie. I like I I have a smoothie every day in the morning to start my day with bananas and mixed berries and protein and all that good stuff. And then I'd say my favorite alcoholic beverage. You know, I like a good I p A. But I would say, like my, I go to drink.

I go to drink if I'm in, like a good bar that I that I trust is a nice vodka gimblet? What a vodka gimblet? All right? I don't I don't know. I don't know if I'm just what the heck is a vodka? Vodka a little lime juice kind of kind of shaking up almost like a martini serv in Martini glass. Like, yeah, it's a little vodka gimblet. Alright, vodka Gimlet I take I take it. You're not a big supporter of the I p A s. Frank. Now, you know my motto,

the cheaper, the better, the cheap for the best the better. Yeah, I roll in the Corey Parson the Fantasy executive train of thought, where Corey is a big Core's light guy. I'm probably not gonna go that low. Probably not gonna go to the Core's light tab draft I got. I got through many years at college with Keystone Light. So Keystone light, you know, you know what Keystone light is.

I mean it's it's the head of Coors Light. Poor's Light and Keystone light are you know, same batch and like the head gets filtered off and it's basically like Keystone light. See, this is why we have Drew Dinkmight here. He's you know, not only see a millionaire. Look, he's a lot smarter than myself and Greg, because first of all, I didn't know. I didn't know what a vodka gimlet was until you know, Drew just brought it up to me. Now we know what a vodka gimlet is. I'm looking

up the recipe here. Two and a half ounces vodka, half ounced fresh lime juice, half ounced simple Zerup. There you go. There's a body, simple drink, simple drink and as simple serup. Drew dink Meyer simple guy. He likes a simple drink. He likes vodka gimlet. He also likes I p a s. Look, you know what, as long as it you know, it makes me have a good time. I'm not really gonna question it, so you know, that's why I go with the cheaper the better personally. You know,

I like whatever light and you can light. Maybe we'll get a beer sponsor on the show one day, but all right, for now, we're gonna leave it. If you have to choose an I p A. Cigar City Highlight is my favorite I PA. It's a Tampa based brewery that just started to get like national distribution. But yeah, Cigar City Highlight my favorite highlight. My favorite I p A. The one thing I will say about I p A

S one they have awesome names too. They have awesome bottles slash cans because I'll see it's it's great from like a marketing perspective, from like I p A S. In general, like differ point, you always see awesome bottom bottle labels, awesome cans for I p A S. And I'm almost enticed to buy one. That's probably why they've done so well in the beer market in the US is the strong marketing. Like we're all just shiny objects of the US. We just want the nice, pretty thing. Definitely,

I'm not a big bitter guy. I don't like bitter stuff, so you know, like I PA tend to be you know, very hoppy, very bitter. You know, I don't like dark chocolate. I don't like I P A S. That's why you know me and my fiance get along so well, is because, uh, we're opposites. So if there's stuff in the fridge, like she won't take anything that's mine and I won't take anything that's sterts because she loves bitter stuff. She loves I P A S. And I just got a bunch

of cheap beer in there. Anyway, intro to MLB DFS, we mentioned it earlier. We were talking a little bit before the show. Analysts mentioned variance a lot when it comes to MLB DFS. If someone's just kind of like diving in now they want to like if their toes a little bit at the start of the of the MLB season four DFS purposes, what the heck does that mean?

So variance is just a way to describe kind of the standard deviation amongst projections and so um to highlight some of the challenges of projecting MLB as a whole.

Um Mike Leone, one of the co founders of Daily Roda, and I were talking about kind of a check on our projections a few weeks ago in mlb DFS, and he noted that if you bucket all of the players on a given slate together, all of the hitters, and you combined with our our projection versus their average kind of air, we have like an our squared of which

is really really really strong. But if you take one individual hitter and just use that as the sample instead of them all grouped together, we aren't a squared of about two, meaning that on a day to day basis, one individual hitter on that day, it's gonna be extremely tough to find a projection that that they're going to meet. But over the course of the season, if you add up all their days, will be very good at projecting them.

And so what you have to do when you're playing mlb DFS is you have to understand that essentially what you're doing is you're trying to just play the game over and over and over again and recognize that each individual game is going to have a wide range of results in them. But if you play the game the same way kind of over and over again over the course of the season, you will eventually add value above

your opponents. It's a difficult thing to get to because a lot of people are playing the US can't withstand kind of the craziness of you know, Bryce Harper is in a great spot in Colorado against a right handed pitcher who's like a soft tosser, and he's not gonna strike out, but then he hits you know, four line drive rocket outs and he goes over for four and gets you no fantasy. People can't deal with that fact

because that doesn't happen in like the NBA. When you take Lebron James, you're getting like already five fantasy points almost every night, regardless of anything you have. The floor exact floor is much different in baseball because again, like

there's so much luck that factors into things. And you know, that's a lot of what we do for scenes long too, when you know Greg and myself or Modica and myself, or do you hear Drew talking about it, and we use babbit a lot when it comes to batting average on balls and play versus batting average, where if you look at a player's hard hit rate for the season and their average exit velocity and the fact that they're

hitting a lot of line drives. But for some reason about how to low babbit or their batting average was a lot lower than what their babbit was. That's what that's you know, when we try to use some of these advanced analytical tools, that's what we're doing to try and find people that are going to perform better than years past, or even for dfs, better than days past, because they've been unlucky. There's a lot more luckiness involved

when it comes to MLB dfs. Yeah, there is because because of what you talked about, you know, uh, professional baseball hitter and only control two things, whether they make contact and how hard a contact they make. From there, they can't control anything else where the ball goes, where defenders are positioned. They have no control over that, and as a result, they control less of the output of

their actual results. And that is why I hate, I hate the kind of old guard of you know, baseball fans and fantasy baseball players and and just like get off my lawn. Uh no, this isn't the morning get off my lawn types. You know, why are we looking at average ex velocity and stat cast and launch angle and and who cares how many degrees the ball is coming off the bat? Because you can use all these factors as future indicators as to whether or not a

baseball players performing. There are so many smart people in baseball and fantasy baseball nowadays that you need to try and find any possible edge that you can get. So, you know, Baseball savant dot com. You go there now and they are just super forward thinking. They have all the stack cast stats. You know, you'll hear the term barrels, barrel is you know, optimal contact. Actually have written down on like a page here so I can remind myself

because it's a lot to remember. Honestly, a barrel, it's optimal contact in baseball at least ninety eight miles per hour, average eggs velocity, between twenty six and thirty three launch angle. What does all this mean? It's optimal contact. If you make that contact, you're expected to have a five batting average and hundred slugging percentage when you make that contact. So when you hear the term barrel, that's what we're

talking about. And you know, for people who are, oh, you know, why do I care how far a ball travels or how hard it's being hit and or what the launch angle is is? You know, these these are factors that you can use is to predict future performance, right, true. Yeah,

So the stat all the stack ca ast indicators. It's gonna be interesting the next few years of what we can find that is actually predictive going forward, because right now they're mostly descriptive, which doesn't mean they're not useful in predicting the future. They absolutely are. But the stability of these statistics, it's gonna take some time to kind

of figure out where they fall. So like barrels and exit velocity and all this stuff is if you relate it back to the past production, it's a great indicator of saying, Okay, this guy has this many barrels, and this guy has had a slugging percentage below fifteen hundred on the barrels, he's more likely to have a slugging percentage more closer. It doesn't mean he's gonna have like seventeen hundred. It just means over time he's gonna have

more hundred. Uh. The ability to continually generate the barrels in the predictiveness, and that is going to be the interesting thing that we find out over over more time as we have more time to work with these datas. But the interesting thing about all this stuff is. You know, people will talk about um old school versus New school in terms of a lot of the statistics are really trying to find a way to analyze old school thought processes.

So exit velocity that's really just a proxy for bat speed. I want to hit the ball hard speed. Every every scout that ever looked at baseball always wanted to evaluate how hard a hitter could generate a swing. How how fast were they able to generate bat speed? That shows up hard hit rates, average exit velocity. You know, and people talk a lot about the launch angle revolution, Well

what does launch angle revolution? What does launch angle? Basically, it's just the angle in which the ball is leaving the bat. And when you can hear people talk about launch anglo revolution, it's everybody's trying to hit fly balls in line drives now because data has shown that hitting more line drives and hitting more UH fly balls at a at a higher average exit velocity is going to lead to more extra base hits, is going to lead to more home runs. Look at Daniel Murphy. Daniel Murphy

is just the He's the poster boy. He's a perfect example. His career with the New York Mets, great contact hitter. What did he always lack? He didn't really have a lot of power. He didn't really He would always had a lot of doubles. Maybe a lot of those doubles would come online, drives, a lot of you know, balls on the ground, down the line. But you know, the past couple of years with the Washington Nationals, he turned into a twenty five home run hitter and he's hitting

you know, well over three hundred. Well why is that Because he's buying into launch angle and he's trying to hit the ball in the air more more so than ever before. So that's why when we talk about you know, I swear hitting the ball harder. You know, the marks that I usually look for is you know, forty percent hard hit rate, ball rate. Now, you don't want your guy to hit the ball too much in the air, because that can be a bad thing as well. Some guys are not meant to hit the ball in the

air fifty percent of the time. I remember a perfect example last year Gregory Polanco started buying into launch angle completely, but he was hitting the ball in the air too much. He had, you know, over fifty percent fly ball rate the first couple of months of the season, and everyone's looking at his batting average and and his his bad Why is it so low because the guy is you know,

he's not meant to do it that often. Now, Gregory Polanco was probably a guy who should have a percent percent line drive rate and maybe closer to a forty percent fly ball rate with a you know, forty percent ground ball rate. He has enough speed to leg out some hits there. That's you know, there's a lot of moving pieces here, and I'm like throwing a lot of people right now. But you get what I'm saying, right, it's a little bit of h It's a little bit

of goldilocks. And in the three bears right, you're like, you're trying to find the porridge. That's just right in terms of the combination of the different the different launch angles and where where guys are hitting the ball more frequently on the air and the ground or and plunco It took some time, but he did turn it up in the second half and turned a lot of that those fly balls into the big power jump that you saw from him. Um, but yeah, certain guys aren't meant

at the ball in the air. You know, if you get I'll see these Escobar with the like a launch angle revolution that's just gonna lead to a bunch of you know, mid tier flyouts. You have to have. You have to have a big guy, strong guy who's hitting the ball hard to want to hit the ball in the air. Other guys, you know, smaller guys you you want to hit line drives and kind of keep the ball in play and and potentially, uh, you know, get to get those singles and doubles. Joey Gallo perfect example.

That's who you want hitting the ball in the air fifty percent of the time because he also has a near fifty hard hit rate, and that's why he's able to maintain, you know, being in the MLB and being Fantasy Baseball relevant with a two ten batting average because he's hitting forty plus home runs. He's gonna be in the middle of a decent lineup in Texas Rangers. But he's in a good ballpark as well. There are a few more things that I want to ask Drew about.

You know, ballpark here a lot, you here, park shift factors a lot when it comes to MLB dfs, and for season long, we kind of us that when we look at a guy like again, Daniel Murphy moving over from the last series with the Nationals and the Cubs. Now he's moving over to the Coulora Rockies. That's arrow up. That's a positive parkshift factor. That's exactly what we want

you know. Later on the show, I might also ask you about a term that I used a little bit this year during the football season, and I was crucified. Drew a term called air yards. Nobody wants to talk about air yards. Air yards are gonna win you a Fantasy football championship through ding Meyer uses their yards. You want a million dollars? I'm not crazy after all, right, guys, Fantasy best Friends for every when we come back. Learn

more about Drew war on MLB DFS. Later on the show, I'm gonna talk a little bit about trying to find the next Christian Yellow do all that. Fantasy best Friends Forever. Fantasy Sports Radio Network Frank Sample through Dicker, we are back. Daily Rodo dot Com learned from the game's best DFS players. We don't just give you advice. We play every day,

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One thing you're gonna learn about me? I like a bunch of different crazy music. There's Greg Susman out there in Florida lounge e on his uh public chairs each chair, yea chairs, lounge chairs doing Florida. Happy c you, Greg, Happy birthday, Happy belated birthday, Happy fiftieth birthday. You a big Bob and Vermont in the chat asking is Greg really fifty years old? Yes he is. Why would I make Why would I make that up? I would never make it that up anyway. Are you at the game, Drew?

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one thousand dollars. That's my Bookie dot a G promo code F n T S Y. I was reading through the chat during the break Drew and somebody asked the question, Frank, weren't you a bartender? You're right, I wasn't bartend, and I still didn't know what a vodka gimlet was. That just kind of tells you what kind of bar I

worked in. I worked. I worked in like an old Irish dive bar, and being perfectly honest, if someone came in and asked me for Martin drink, I was we don't have that at Yeah, we don't have we don't have the ingredients. We have Scotch and we have beer. I can put you a shot, I can unscrew a beer for you. Um, that's pretty much the extent the extent of what I did when I was a bartender. Getting to know Drew dink mar that's Drew drink over

there live into studio Daily Roader dot com. Make sure you follow him over at Drew dink Meyer on Twitter. I'd have a few questions here, Which one do I want to ask him? Next? I asked him about his beverage. Who's your favorite baseball team? Drew? I'm a Cubs fan. So I I grew up in South Florida, and I'm from South Florida, but my family is from Chicago originally. So when I grew up in South Florida, because I'm kind of old, not as old as Greg, but there

was only the Dolphins. There was no Miami Heat yet they came a little bit later. There were know Miami Marlins, they came a little bit later. So I was raised as Chicago sports fan, so I grew up room for the Cubs. I appreciate that you're at least consistent, though, because you know that you're a Bulls fan. I know that I've kind of disowned the Bulls, but yeah, yeah, I'm technically a Bulls fan, but I've kind of disowned them.

With the Nicks, so there's only so much and they get you know, Kevin Zion, like, I'll jump back in for sure. Yeah, you're a band get yourself out of abusive relationships. If you're an abusive relationship, like, just get

out of it. If someone wants to call me out and say you're a bandwagon fan, first of all, I still watch every single game because I want to see Kevin Knox develop so and you know, I went through so many years of like sub twenty win seasons as a New York Nick fan, watching like Chris Duhan and you know, David Lee was awesome, but watching Tony Douglas

and you know, give me a break. If I want to take a few years off and then jump back on the bandwagon as a Knicks fan, I'm allowed to do that because I've suffered for so much in my life, so I don't want hear anything. I also get really angry, you could kind of hear in my voice through when people do not root for where for teams where they are geographically located. Now, you have laid it out perfectly that there were no teams in Florida when you were there,

and you have you you mentioned you had family rightfic. So, all right, that makes fair, That makes sense to me. But for people who live in New York or live in New Jersey, you live in the Tri state area, but you don't live in Massachusetts and you're a Patriots fan, you're a Celtics fan, you're a Red Sox fan. Come on, like, give me a break. We we can't have that. It's just ah, I'm just big on like geographic location. When you went to high school, you had a pep rally.

You you root for your high school. You you know, when you go to college, you root for your college. You know, there's there's something, there's camaraderie, there's team spirit there. The same thing goes for professional sports. Sorry, alright, moving on, alright, got that out of my system through What are some of the guess differences between draft Kings and fandom. Don't mean to like put you on the spot gear. I

know Fandel uses one starting pitcher. DraftKings uses too, uh, Fandel. Also, you tell me if you like this or not a little bit more. I guess forward thinking. They eliminated the catcher, not completely, but they merged catcher and first base, but they also added a utility spot over on DraftKings, you still have to use a catcher for those the only

differences and there's which one do you like more. Yeah, there's some differences in scoring as well, So on fan duels some of the scoring is a little bit more geared towards runs and r BIS, and on DraftKings some of the scoring is a little bit more geared towards ISO. So like an individual players performance is a little bit more reflected on DraftKings, whereas team performance is a little

bit more reflected on FANDEL. But the big difference between the two is the use of two starting pitchers versus one starting pitcher. And I prefer the use of two starting pitchers because it separates a lot of the different ways that you can build lineups in general, because you can go with two expensive starting pitchers and then fill out with a bunch of cheap pitters. Where you can go one expensive starting pitcher, one cheap starting pitcher, and

then have like more of a balance lineup. So it creates just different ways for people to play that I really enjoy FANDAL. I feel like on some days, because you're only able to choose one picture, almost everybody's playing the same picture. And then you're just trying to differentiate based on hitters, and it's a little bit more challenging. So I like draft kings. I think there's more ways to play the game on draftings a little bit better.

Speaking of starting pitchers and that position specifically, how do you attack that position on a daily basis? And I know you know the right answer. The easy answer might be, well, it's all depending on value obviously, like it's depending on salary and price. But do you find yourself more so in baseball than I guess other sports, like you see the starting pitchers and you just naturally want to pay up for that position. I think it is starting pitcher

because it's it's interesting. It's very different than season long baseball. In the sense of season long baseball, you're total in the draft strategy that you know, pictures are the least predictable asset going forward, and a lot of that has to do simply with health. You don't have to worry about that on a day to day basis. If if a guy is healthy and pitching, like you know, he's healthy,

so you don't have to worry about lets. Of course, they get hit by lines, right unless they get hurt mid game, but that doesn't happen as frequently, so you know that pictures have more ability to generate consistent performance profiles on a game by game basis compared to hitters, so oftentimes you do want to spend up on them. I mentioned in Gabe Show that I generally don't like giving rules of thumb in DFS because I think they can get you in more trouble than they can help you.

But I think in in DFS baseball there is one rule of thumb for pitching that I think is very, very helpful, And in general, you want to be thinking of your picture selection in strikeouts per dollar spent? How many strikeouts are you getting per dollar spent? People focus way too much on runs allowed, hits a loud different things like that, strikeouts are king in DFS. They're the most predictable of all the individual component stats and they're

worth the most. So a lot of times will be taking pictures that you know might not project to work super deep into the game. They might project to have like a high implied total against. But there are guys who can generate strikeouts, and if they can do it at a cheap price tag, that allows you to get a lot of the bats because there's generally more upside

and hitting than there's in pitching. But pitching is a little bit more projectable on a game by game basis, and that makes sense because there's guys like Robbie Ready comes to mind, where he might not go deep into games, go five innings, but he might give you, you know, seven, eight, nine, ten strikeouts in those five ending Nick Pavetta another one that comes to mind last year where she the high

e r A. Everyone's jumping, you know Nick Pavetta. This year, why well, the e r A indicators are a lot lower than his ear A was last year, and he did generated a lot of swings and mrs and he got a lot of strikeouts. So those are some of the things that Drew is looking at obviously, when you're finding starting pictures that you want to use, your trying to find teams that you want to target against. YEP, for example, the Baltimore are gonna suck this year and

they're probably gonna strike out a lot. So you're really just looking at like K percentage for opposing teams as well. When you're trying to Yeah, you want you want as many balls in play as you can if you're attacking with an offense. So if you're going up against an opposing picture that does and generate a lot of strikeouts, that can be a really good thing. But you also

want to look at when you're selecting your hitters. You want to take opposing pictures like to give up fly balls because again, we want more more balls in the air, more opportunity for slugging and power because home runs, just like strikeouts are king for pitchers, home runs are king for hitters in DFS. And then the last thing that I think you know it is getting talked about a little bit more in DFS circles these days, but wasn't talked about for a few years, uh, is bullpen strength.

You really want to attack teams that have weak bullpens on the whole and don't have a lot of depth to their bullpen because as we've seen the game evolve over the last few years with openers and with different strategies and multiple uses, but they must have last year it's the it's a hassle for our projection system. This year, we're gonna try to tackle it a little bit more efficiently than we have in the past. But when a

team changes that strategy mid mid midway through. Uh, it is it is difficult to fit into a projection system, but you generally want to attack teams that have weak overall pitching depth, not just the starting pitcher um, because sometimes you'll get like you'll go up against the Yankees and they might throwing out you know, somebody that does give up a lot of flyballs and is home run prone, and that's great for the first three or four innings, but then if they play from a head and they

get into that bullpen, the good parts of that bullpen, you're getting shut down for the last four or five. Continuing with hitters in dfs and who you're trying to target on a nightly basis or daily basis. Um, how much does lineup matter? Because my thinking is you want as many batters high up in the lineup as you can possibly get because it just makes sense, like you give yourself a more opportunity for at bats, more opportunities to to get on basis score runs, so on and

so forth. So is that again you don't like to use general rules with them, and I understand that, but is that one where you kind of make an extensions exception, like you want players who are high up in line up. In generally, you want hitters that are hitting within the top you know, five spots in the lineup, sometimes six if it's on a really good offense on the whole, that you know is going to be able to turn that roster over more consistently. UM. But yeah, you've you've

hit the nail on the head, frank. You want to try to maximize plate appearances because every plate appearance for a hitter, no matter how bad the hitter is, is a positive expected value in terms of their overall points projection or per plate appearance. Every single hitter and MLB is positive. So the more plate appearances you can get,

those are stacking up advantages on your opponents. UM. So there's some small differences between like hitting first and hitting fourth that are somewhat negligible because the opportunity of an added plate appearances UH is mitigated by hitting in the middle of the lineup where you have more runners on base to generate runs and r bis and different things like that. But in general, you want hitters hitting near

the top of the lineup UM. And in general you also want hitters UM that hitting near the top of the line up on the road because they're guaranteed that ninth inning of plate appearances as opposed to at home wherein some of that is mitigated by like home field advantage in terms of run scoring. That's an actual added

impact of turning that lineup over. But in general, like one of the most valuable positions in all of dfs over the last five or six years has been road leadoff hitter corpse field, because not only are you getting the extra chance of a potential plate appearance, the plate appearance is super valuable in course field that road leadoff hitter corse field, but specifically road hitters inside the top five is where you typically would target again inside good

ballparks and course field is obviously one of the best. All Right, next up here, Drew, what's your favorite color? Favorite color is blue. Favorite color is blue, but I'm wearing red. I'm almost always in blue. Though I'm almost always in blue. I just I love blue. I always have all Right, So we have blue, we have I p A for Drew, we have vodka, Jimlett. What is your favorite food, Drew oh Man, So, my favorite food, Like, if I had if I had one thing to eat,

it would either be pizza or macaroni and cheese. Those are those are like the two things that are like that are you know, they're they're my staples and my go too is when I can have them. They are not very good for you, and as there's a lot, I've had to cut back on them quite a bit, but those are the two things that are my go toos. How is pizza in Florida? So, I mean that's a loaded question being in New York, right, Like that's like, are you just trying to eat as much pizza here

this week? I've had a lot of pizza while I've been up here. So yeah, it's an artichoke pizza. I have not been. Someone's got to take you. I might take you because it's not really like it's not typical pizza. They have some stuff they're like they have Margarita slice, but I don't think that they have locations in other states. I think they have like a few locations here in

New York. Um, it's really good. The Artichokes slice is kind of like they use this like alfredo sauce on top of it, but also has like regular pizza cheesetokes And normally I wouldn't be in on like any of those things, but the culmination of it together is really really good, so we might need to make that happen. Macaroni and cheese? What kind of macaroni and cheese do you eat? Are you? You know, make it from scratch kind of guy? Rac and cheese. I'll eat all of it.

I'll eat and and any and all of the perfectly. But I think like homemade mac and cheese with like the bread crumbs on top bakon. Yeah, yeah, that's the stuff Drewyer getting me hung and excited. Here Tuesday, Februar eight twelve. Here we are Frank Stanford, Drew dink Meyer. Make sure you follow Drew at Drew dink Meyer Dailly Rhodot dot com. Alright, so we spoke a little bit about, you know, targeting road players who are inside the top four or five inside of a lineup in good ballparks.

Now this might be, I don't know, kind of an obvious question, but like what are the best ballparks at target? Um? You know, what are the best websites to use to figure out park shift factors? Because I know there's a bunch of different ones that offer different statistics when it comes to park shift factors. Yeah, so I would say, you know, park factors vary a lot on a year to year basis, and so you have to be kind of understanding that there's a lot of variants in them

a year to year basis. I know, when Atlanta's new park opened up last year, the first half of the season, everyone was like, oh, this is the best hitters park, Like it's playing way more hit or friendly than we ever expected. And then the second half of the season it kind of neutralize a little bit. Um. The the easiest way to kind of figure out the best hitting environments, honestly is use vegas totals. That'll like get you that, that'll get you there the quickest. Use I was gonna

ask you about that too. I imagine you know for all dfs, you you want to use totals. In football, we look at you know, the totals, the spreads you you know you want to again, you want to use that. You want to try and get every advantage as you possibly can. An NBA we used you know over under faming for baseball. Yeah, that'll get you there the fastest. There's certainly the nuance around this is that some parks

play better at different times of the year. And the reason is whether has a huge influence Chicago earlier on in the season exactly, you don't want to play you know, in general Chicago hitters or hitters in those parks early in the season when it's cold, you've got the lake

effect with the wind blowing in. You get the summer months though, where the wind blows out and it just becomes you know, these huge total games where sometimes you'll see games in the thirteen or fourteens until rules, which you don't even get in course Field sometimes because the park effect, so it's very much dependent on weather and in general, Vegas totals will kind of lead you there. But I'd say, you know, some of the best ballparks

in baseball, course Field certainly stands out as one. Baltimore, especially in the summer months when it's really hot on the East Coast, really stands out as one. Texas is always one of the best hitting environments because they also have a weather advantage during the course of the year where there are warmer park than most of the other parks throughout the course of the year. Um So those are some of the parks that really stand out. I feel like Texas has this wind tunnel too out to life.

That was the center field, which makes sense for a guy like Joey. Yeah, that was the thing that was um highly highly debated in the last few years because they put up something in the batter's eye that actually changed the wind directions on on the stadium a little

bit into the wind tunnel effect. That hasn't been as strong in recent years, but like three or four years ago left center field, it was actually a weird jet stream effect where when the wind was blowing in, it was actually better for hitting because there was this like weird jet stream effect. Architects no thing that we don't Yeah, yeah, yeah,

well that's the thing. So like San Francisco, I'm sure like the owners and the fronts like, all right, well you need to build it this way so that you know, San Francisco. San Francisco has a ton of wind all the time, but their park is designed to mitigate wind and so it actually has almost no impact. When you see these like games where there's like twenty two mile an hour winds out in San Francisco, it doesn't play any different. Yeah, I mean it's just a massive ballpark, right, So, um,

there you go in terms of stacking players. I heard you talk a little bit about this on the morning after Again, Look, you could stack players in football, you can stack players in basketball. I assume you could do the same thing in baseball. How many players can you stack on a given lineup? And is it a profitable strategy? Yes, it is. It is the most profitable strategy. And GPPs

because the correlations really work in your favor. When lineups get going, they're creating more opportunities than all the other teams that you're playing against. And so on DraftKings you can stack up to five hitters from the same team on fandily you can go up to four hitters on the same team, I believe, um, And you want to be doing that in GPPs. You want to be increasing correlation in your lineups on the whole. There he is Drew dink Meyer here live in studio from Daily Roado

dot com. We come back and find out more about Drew dink Meyer. We will also dive in a little bit more about which analytical tools you can use for fantasy baseball to help yourself gain an advantage. Um, maybe we'll get to you know who. This few predictions who's the next Christian Yellis for this season? Fantacy best Friends Forever, Frank Sample be right back. The Fantasy Sports Network is hitting you from all angles with the best fantasy sports

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to get your bonus deposit match through dingma higher. What did you do before you were so great at dfs I worked in finance, but not the way that most people think about finance. So most people think about like trading or analysis or different things like that. I worked for an institutional investment consulting firm and I did research

on investment managers. So the people who were picking stocks or our clients were the people that I did research on, and a lot of it was qualitative and mixed with quantitative.

It helped me develop a quick understanding of like behavioral economics and the fact that people just chase the most recent returns and like what did well recently, and that helped prepare me for DFS UM and I was often tasked with trying to find and evaluate investment managers on a different level, on a level that was more qualitative in nature. So in English, Nick Myers really smart. He's a lot smarter than the rest of us. I will gladly admit that I have. You know, there's no shame

in saying that. But yeah, the question I was gonna ask was that kind of helped prep you for like fantasy? It did in a lot of ways. It helped me understand so I would you know, I would make recommendations to our investment committee for managers that I thought did a good job that we should have long term our client is invested in and our investment committee would approve or or you know, disapprove of them, and the reasons for that would range in a wide array of reasons.

And what it helped me to do is learn discipline of understanding that like, if you have conviction in a process, that you should stick with that process despite what results may be short term. And essentially that's really the whole part of DFS that has helped me be successful in the sense that I know I have something that works, and at times it's not gonna work, and I'm going to lose often and I'm gonna feel like I don't

know what I'm doing. But as long as I can keep along that process that has proven to be successful long term, I will eventually find my path again. And so it's kind of helped my temperament um and understanding. There's a lot of similarities between finance and and you know, basically DFS is like day trading, so there's a lot of similarities. I know, our guests yesterday, Matt Modica, you know,

he used to have a financial background as well. He did a lot regarding that and you know it's kind of you see it in the way that he writes, in the way that he talks about fantasy, that he kind of looks at things a little it differently. You know, he talks a lot about, like I, return on investment and you know, buying and selling at the right times, and you know that's what we look at. Um, what I look at from season long is what I like to do, and you gotta know when to do it correctly.

Is you know, buying last year's trash because you know, people who got burned by Luis Castillo last year, they're not gonna want to go back to that. Well, Um, you know, just in general, I like to you know, look at the players that you're getting a discount on

this year versus years past. Carlos Martinez another guy that you're getting a discount on this year, where you know his return on investment can be uh, you know, he could be a profitable player because of you know, where he was going in years past and what he was

the value that he was returning. And that's why a lot of the players that I will target in season long will be you know, players that have struggled either last year or recently and then you have those kind of advanced analytics to tell you that they're going to be better moving from then. The other thing that I did is while I didn't pick stocks myself, the people that I interacted with and evaluate on today today basis

were the ones who were picking stocks. And one thing that I learned from them was that there there should be a theoretical price on every different company that you would want to invest in them at. And so I think a lot of people who play dfs casually they get burned by a player and they're like, Oh, I'm never gonna take that player again, and that's it's got

to be short memory. You have to and you have to have every single player that's playing on a given night there has to be a price that you would be willing to play them at. It doesn't have to be a price that they're offered at, but there should be every single player on the slate there should be a price that you would play them at, in a price that you would not play them at. And I don't think a lot of people that play dfs kind of casually think through that they're not as price sensitive

as they should be. As ted DiBiase used to say, everybody has a price through you ever watched wrestling or anything. I was very briefly into wrestling as a kid. I was like the sting Rick Flair kind of era was when I was watching wrestling, pretty good era to be part of. I did want to jump in a little bit here. Um. You know, we didn't talk a lot about Pacific players today, but I did want to kind

of go into the Christian yellis last year. I wanted to get, you know, Drew's thoughts, as he have an opinion. I put out a poll before the show started at the Fantasy BFF Twitter account and I asked people who

can be this year's Christian yellish? And you know, other people are gonna have different definitions of Chrisman yells because you know, Drew was talking to me during the break and he said, you know, so we're trying to find, you know, a guy who changed parts who uh, you know, hits the ball on the ground a lot, who makes a lot of contact but still has upside, you know,

if they were moving to a new location. My thinking was I was looking at it more from just like a season long perspective and out feeler who was going, you know, round three or later, who can return first round value, because ultimately that's what Christian Yellows did last year. I know, you know, as we got closer to draft season, he was moving up draft boards, like once he went

over to Miller Park and he was playing in Milwaukee. Uh, you know a lot of people were buying in and pushing him into the third round, the early third round in Fantasy baseball drafts. He was the National League MVP had a ridiculous, ridiculous second have before I tell you mine, I'll throw it over to you, Drew, is there someone in the pole that the four pole that had in the poll was Andrew Benintendie, Tommy Famluig. You know, maybe

he fits because he moves over to Cincinnati. And then I also included David dal who's playing with Colorado, who just really needs to stay healthy. Is there any one of those that makes sense to you or are you looking in a different direction? No, those those are really good names. I think the one that makes that jumped out to me was Puige and I had actually kind of come to that assessment without even recognizing that he was on the pole. So I feel I feel like,

that's definitely my answer. Pueg was the guy that had his runs and RBI is a little bit suppressed by hitting low. And the Dodgers lineup was hitting in a tough park and was in a division that is loaded with tough parks. Right Like, obviously they have Course Field,

but pet goes a difficult park to hit in. Dodger Stadium is a difficult parts hit now Oracle, Yeah, yeah, the Giants, the Giants parks a difficult park to hit, and and Arizona with the human or last year went from a positive offense and environment to a negative one. So that's basically the four parks in the division that you're mostly playing their games in their difficult offensive environments. You go into the NL Central and Milwaukee is a

great park, Cincinnati is a great park. Hittsburgh is a tough park. Chicago is a you know, bipolar park. It plays great sometimes of the years, it's difficult other times of the year. So it's a little bit scheduled induced um. But I think that week will hit in a better spot in the lineup. He's getting a huge park upgrade. He's in the midst of his career. He's a guy that had a strikeout rate that was somewhat similar to

Christian Yellich. And while he started to hit a few more flyballs last year because the Dodgers have been on the launch angle revolution led by Justin Turner, what they did for Max Monthly last year, Chris Taylor, all these guys um, so we got a little bit of that influence on him. Now he gets the influence of Joey Vado as well in terms of plate discipline and controlling the strike zone. We does run a little bit similar

to Christian yellig so we would be my guy. You know, I hadn't even thought about the effect that a guy like Joey Vado and have on him, because you're right, I don't think it's solely on Joey Votto. But look at a guy like Scooter Jeannette, right that came over from Milwaukee to Cincinnati, kind of improves all around as an offensive hitter, his recognition of of pitches, of the strike zone in general, not striking out as much, making harder contact. He's really become a mainstay at the second

based position for fantasy baseball. And you gotta you gotta ask yourself how much did being around a guy like Joey Vado, even if Joey Vado is not just like in his ear all the time telling him like, all right, here's what you need to do it to your swing. Here's how you identify this pitch. I think just being around a guy like Joey Vado and kind of seeing his approach and seeing, you know, how he goes up

to the plate. I remember Michael Florio told me this a few years ago that Joey Vado changed the way that he held the bat based on who he was facing. Every single day. He had like multiple different ways that he would hold the bat, like he would choke up this far. I mean, he looks kind of crazy sometimes if you go up there and you watch Joey Vado, you watch Cincinnati Red games, like he's choking all the way up on the bat um. He's doing things that

other people aren't. I remember, specifically, he used to have a certain way that he would bat and hold the bat just when he was facing Clayton Kershaw's kind of the brilliance of Joey vot is the treasure, and it's one of the one of the guys that you know, Baseball's dropped the ball on promoting their stars in a number of ways. But Joey Votto is a guy that

should be a national star. The personality is incredible. If you see, like all the videos that pop up during the course of the season of Joe Vatto interacting with fans, like you know, exchanging jerseys in the crowd. He's out there for sure, he's awesome, and like these guys should be marketed in a more substantial way, as like Joey Votto and Mike Trout are just a blessing to have in the game, and they're just not marketed well enough

in their individual sport. So if I told you that ye was going pick seventy one right now in the NFBC, that's a nationally Fantasy Baseball Championship. The two outfielders that are going just ahead of him are Lorenzo Kane and George Springer, you would say, what I think, he's probably you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of jump in production expected there with the guys that he's going around. But those guys make sense to me in the sense that those guys are candidates as well. Those

guys are in good ballparks as well. I think i'd bet on ya c l Pweags upside over Lorenzo Caine. I think Springer has a similar level of upside and Springer has a better lineup overall to hit in, so I'd probably take Springer out of him. I think Lorenzo Caine is a little bit of a safer investment than yas l peeg Um. But at that point in the draft, I'm still kind of looking for upside um over safety.

I kind of prioritize like rejectable safety in the early rounds in the draft, and then as we get in the mid rounds, I try to take on a little bit more risk, and then depending on the overall risk profile of my team is how I deal with the later rounds. Sometimes I have a risky team that i've started, I'll go for like safer guys with playing time. Other times, if I start with like a more safe team, I'll

kind of mix in some risk later on um. But I would say I like Twig ahead of Cane similar to Springer, but I think Springers a little bit of a safer due to the team environment with Houston on the whole, and I think with George Springer, he's kind have fallen down here. Yeah, this seems too low for George Springer. He's going to pick sixties six. I get that. Look, he's not gonna run. He ran a lot when he was in the minors, and like that's never really come

to that. That's the level um. And he's kind of a guy that you know, he needs to play every single day, Like he's he's a guy who accumulates stats like he's gonna score a hundred runs assuming that he plays all the time and that he's healthy. And you know, he'll come close to hitting thirty home runs assuming that he's healthy. But you know he's gonna bat lead up, so maybe you have some RBI production the batting average you know, to sixty seventy range. But I mean, I

feel he's fallen down the draft board a little bit too. Yeah, that's that's got to be the lack of running, as you alluded to there, because he's he's so consistent in the run scoring opportunities because the offense is still good. So he's always going to be playing in a in a good offense, you know, hitting at the top of the order, and he's a guy that you know is you know, to six seventy five, which in this day

and age in baseball, that's not an average detractor. Yeah, that's above average actually, because league average is what we're right round two fifty. So it's weird. It's weird to think of George Springer as a guy that's adding to your batting every from the hole. Yeah, definitely my pick would be. And we spoke about this a little bit too during the breaks. Tommy fam and I've kind of

I've talked about him a little bit so far. You know, Greg and I have a team, we have an auction team together where we're kind of trying to identify players that we both like. And Tommy Fam was just one of these guys that jumped off the page. Um and I think there are a lot of similarities between Christian Yellows too. He didn't change teams in the All season here, but he changed teams last year from the St. Louis

Cardinals over to the Tampa Bay Rays. So look, it's a much better division to hit in now, not necessarily the trop but you know, he's gonna he's gonna play in the stadium, he's gonna play in Candy, he's gonna play in Fenway, forty eight point five percent hard hit rate last year, similar to Christian Yellows hits the ball on the ground a lot forty eight percent of the time, but hits a lot of line drives. Ideally, you'd want to see him increase that launch angle, hit more flyballs.

But look at his home run to flyball ratio in his career twenty three point nine percent, and that's over the course of fifteen just about appearances. That's a pretty big sample size. So that tells me that he can sustain a home run the flyball ratio of over you know, he can see you anywhere from bases. Steals are the big thing there too, because five home runs, Tampa Bay is a team that's going to be willing to run.

They've always been a team that's willing to run, so so that's the thing that really really is important for for them to be able to generate those stolen bases. Before we get into Tommy fam for the rest of the show, I do want to sign off YouTube. Thank everybody for watching and listening today. If you're watching on YouTube,

make sure you give us the thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe to the Fantasy Sports Network YouTube channel as well, if you're listening on demand, make sure you rate, review, subscribe, give us five stars, leave us a comment, so on

and so forth. We thank you very very much. With Tommy, fam if you want to get him this year, there is a price to pay though that like you're basically paying for It's not the ceiling in my opinion, because again, if I'm calling him Christian Yellow, that means and I think he can return maybe not first round value, he still does strike out a lot, but I think he

can return second, third round value. Right now, he's going to pick a fifty seven, So in a team league, at the end of the fourth round, I feel like he should be going closer to the Springer puig T here. I think he should be falling down a little bit, like I think he's a little bit for a little bit of the ceiling here with Tommy. Yeah, and I is not young. He's thirty. Yeah, I think that's kind

of surprising. Good, But he's interesting career kind of guys a little bit longer to get up to the big leagues and some of these guys, but had immediate success when he when he did get up there. Yeah, and look, if you read the story last year on sports. I don't know if you call it this at all. Drew, he was basically, you know, he was very upfront about how he felt like, I'm better than the players on the Cardinals. Why are they playing you know, these guys

ahead of me? You know, he didn't back away from that. You know, he used some used some interesting language as well. So, I mean, he's a fiery due. I don't want to buy into like narrative. I mean, we're supposed to be like a statistical show. We're supposed to you know, draft players based on statistical information. But I mean it kind of makes me like him a little bit more too, if I'm just being honest. All yeah, So so Tommy

fan would be my pick. Look, uh, Andrew Bennintendie is winning the poll right now, fifty one percent of the vote. I think, Look, he's gonna be a popular pick. He's still, you know, just twenty four years old, plays in a good hitting environment in Boston. It's not so great in terms of being a lefty in Fenway, but the lineup that he plays in with Mookie Betts and and j D. Martinez, I understand why a lot of people are gonna want Benintendie,

but still does struggle against lefties. That's been constant throughout his career at the MLB level, So something like that worries me a little bit. True, I'm also not sure that he has the high end power that a launch angle change would really unlock a lot of power for him. I think he you know, and that's what kind of

what happened with Yellows is. He was the guy that hit a ton of groundballs in Miami and then all of a sudden started hitting fly balls a little bit a little bit better rate, not a ton better rate, but the ball just jumped out of the park more often than Miller Park. I'm not sure Benntenni has that upper end raw power that's going to translate into a ton of home runs. I think he's all gonna be a really solid average guy and in that lineup generated

lots of runs in RBIs. You know a lot of people were calling him Benny Biceps last year, and I have to question where's the beef here when it comes to Andrew Benintenni, because I'm looking at his statistical profile is bad at ball data here, a lot of medium contact in a year where hard hit rate went bananas. In baseball, the league average was thirty five percent. This was twenty eight percent. I mean, Benny Biceps on this guy, isn't Benny biceps nine point four percent home run to

fly ball ratio. Look, he's only again, he's only twenty four years old. He'll turn twenty five in July this year. So now I guess there's a chance that he, you know, put on some muscle in the off season. But little skeptical skeptical with BENNONTENNI that is Drew dink Meyer. Make sure you follow him at Drew dink Myer of Daily Road dot Com threw, thank you so much having for coming on. I hope you had fun. Yeah, I had a great time. Thank you for having me. Alrighty uh,

Fantasy best friends forever, Frank Stamfell. Remember everybody, stay classy. Fantasy owners see tomorrow