DFS Strategy: Quantifying Home Field Advantage

Home field advantage, every sports fan has heard the term but other than perhaps three points in football and less fouls in basketball, is it really meaningful? Today we're going to look at the impact playing at home has on the scoring potential according to various DFS scoring systems.

The first part of the study looks at the average hitter and average pitcher from the past three seasons and computes their DFS points for Fantasy Aces, FanDuel and Draft Kings. Let's take a look.

HITTERS

Let's have a show of hands, how many thought the differences would be greater? To be honest, I did. And we may be right. Now let's look at the hitter's skills home and away.The percent stats are normalized to per plate appearance.

So skills at home are indeed better. Weighted on base average, or wOBA is a proxy for run production. Batting average on balls in play is commonly used to point out luck but it's driven by line drive percent which is a skill. On a per plate appearance basis batters hit more homers, fan less, walk much more and steal much more at home.

Then why isn't this reflected in the DFS points per game?

Remember, the above is normalized PER PLATE APPEARANCE. Because the home team doesn't hit in the ninth inning of games in which they're ahead, teams have more road plate appearances. To wit:

For those that use the daily projections here at Fantasy Alarm, this is factored into the calculation. Hitters play better at home but get more chances on the road. That's why the actual average points per site are basically the same home and away.

Hopefully you're thinking along with me and realize this isn't the end of the story. Over the course of the season, who is going to pick up the majority of those road plate appearances? It's not going to be those at the top off the order but rather those towards the bottom. This observation is deserved of its own study but to give you a feel for the difference, here's the plate appearance data for the first and seventh spots in the batting order.

.As expected, the percent increase for a batter lower in the order is greater than that of the leadoff hitter. Before we fine tune this with a follow-up study, the actionable conclusions are

1. The players near the top of the order gain more of a home field advantage than those towards the bottom.
2. If you're going to use a player hitting down in the order, it's better to do it on the road.

 PITCHERS

So as opposed to hitters, pitchers gain a rather significant home park advantage. If home batters score more runs, hit more homers, walk more and whiff less, it stands to reason home starting pitchers surrender fewer runs, homers and walks while fanning more hitters than on the road. We'll save the bandwidth since it's rather obvious, but along with averaging 6 innings a home start versus 5 2/3rds per road effort, starting pitchers win eight percent more games at home than on the road.

On paper this is interesting but it becomes less so when you figure those that set game odds are no doubt aware of the above data so when they set the game odds, that's factored in. In other words, if you use the Vegas odds to determine which pitchers are more likely to get a victory on a given slate and then give them another boost since they're at home, you're double-dipping.

That said, I use the above data when I project DFS points for each pitcher, They get a boost in strikeouts and projected innings relative to their expectation as well as expecting fewer hits, walks and earned runs.

The take home lesson here is pitchers fare better at home so how you integrate this into your process depends on what else is involved in the process as well as how integral the win is to your success. The scoring system on the various sites weigh wins differently. In addition, wins are less important in case games but can make a huge difference in large-entry tournaments.

Next time we'll take a closer look at the influence of batting order on home field advantage.