For this, the first in our season-long series of DFS Strategy articles, I wanted to start with a bit of a lesson on playing MLB DFS as a whole and preach on the principle known as “random variation”. This term can be applied to just about anything, but when it comes to fantasy baseball, it points to the fact that there is plenty of random occurrences over the course of a grueling 162-game schedule. For season-long players, this isn’t as big of a deal - especially, rotisserie leaguers - as the players’ performance tends to even out by the end and you have plenty of data to make a conclusion about a player and his performance.

Where things get tricky with DFS, is that, on any given day, this random variation plays a major role. The reason for telling you this is simple. If you are a Playbook PRO subscriber, you clearly want to learn, play and win. What random variation tells us is that you must play consistently in order to lessen the effect on your points totals and bankroll.

There is a reason that Major League Baseball plays twice as many games as the next closest major sport. There is more random variation in this sport than any other.  We can learn from this when playing DFS MLB.

To illustrate this a bit more, let’s use a real baseball example.

Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez had the best single month of any player in any month throughout the 2016 season. In August, he slugged 11 homers, drove in 21 RBI, drew 18 walks and a slash line of .389/.458/.832 for a wRC+ of 240. An amazing month for anybody, much less a rookie making his debut.

I’m going to pull out a few dates to highlight from that magical month of August:

August 9: 0-4, 1 K
August 13: 0-4
August 21: 0-3, 1 BB, 1 K

August 30: 1-6, 2 K’s

So, in this month of crazy production, Sanchez still failed to perform at all in four of 24 starts. As you can see, when you shrink the sample size down to a single day things reset and become random. If you just so happened to play on the 9th, 13th, 23rd and 30th and played this all-world phenom catcher in your lineups, you’d be wondering what’s all of the fuss about?

You see, playing consistently with the right amount of tools and research will limit the effects of random variation and make you a better player and a more profitable player.

To further this illustration, take a look at his line on the day after the 8/9 clunker. On 8/10 he went 4-for-5 with a homer and two runs scored. He also homered on the 14th and hit two on the 22nd. Looks like he put the bad ones behind him and moved on. Similarly, we are going to have bad days. Just like Sanchez, we can’t take that with us into the next day. It’s a clean slate every day. That’s the beauty of baseball and the beauty of DFS.

There is another way to try your best to curb this random variation from taking over. Limit your risk. Go for volume and build lineups that protect against this principle. Remember that the pure home run hitters are more likely to go 0-for-4 with 3 strikeouts while they are more likely to hit 2 homers in a game. Utilize those types of players in GPP and tournament lineups. Ride hot streaks early on (3-4 games) and get out after it’s been 5-6 days. Remember hot streaks always come to an end and usually with a thud. Same can be said about cold streaks. If a proven hitter or pitcher has been struggling of late, there is profit there when that streak comes to an end and the players goes back to being their dominant selves while others are sitting out on them.

We are here every day with the information you need to develop your lineups and our DFS team will put out a new article each week (on Thursdays) with different strategy articles from lineup construction to ownership percentages. We’ll hit on it all. The first step to winning is showing up. So, stick with us throughout the season. When we have an 0-for-4 one day, we’ll be back the next day to hit two out of the park. Deal?

Let’s have a great 2017 MLB DFS season...together.