The Scroll MLB Best Ball Edge

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While NFL Best Ball is becoming a more solved game each season due to the amount of attention being paid to it, MLB Best Ball is still newer and smaller, leaving more opportunity to find advantage. While the prize pools aren’t NFL level, Underdog still has a $1.25M main tournament as well as other tournaments with 5- and 6-figure prize pools. Not shabby! 

To prepare to attack these tournaments, there are some basic principles we should first understand (many of these will be expanded upon in their own articles – think of this as a high-level overview):

Rankings in Best Ball are a wonderful tool but they need to be used thoughtfully, not just followed blindly. For one, if you just follow rankings blindly, you’re going to be doing the same thing as everyone else who’s using those same rankings. For two, it’s going to lead to suboptimal roster construction and if you’re building a portfolio of multiple rosters (which most people are), some extreme exposures. 

If you’re building a bunch of rosters on Underdog, one of the simplest measurements you can use is to look at your player exposures. All players who are drafted in (just about) every draft are going to be roughly 8.3% owned by the field (they’re picked in every draft and there are 12 teams, so 12/100). So, if you have more than that, you’re overweight the field, and if you have under that, you’re underweight the field. Easy peasy, right?

If you’ve played NFL Best Ball you are no doubt familiar with the strategies of “Zero RB” and “Hero RB.” Those are variants of the same thing which are basically – wait on drafting running backs because they’re A) extremely injury prone and B) have production that’s highly tied to their team. The majority of NFL Best Ball analysis is going to tell us to wait on drafting running backs and load up on wide receivers early, and the data supports this as smart strategy.

If you’ve played NFL Best Ball (or DFS), you’re no doubt familiar with the concept of stacking – having multiple players from the same team because when one guy has a ceiling performance, it’s likely other guys do too. In NFL this is primarily about a quarterback and his pass catchers, but running backs can be included as well as if a team scores more points than expected, there can be opportunity for everyone.

In MLB the same principle applies. When a guy scores a run, someone else probably drove him in and gets an RBI. If a guy hits a home run, everyone on base scores. In MLB DFS, we stack because baseball is a sport of high correlation – when an offense has a big game, lots of players generally put up big scores. It’s the same in Best Ball. We’re seeking out spiked weeks, and a team having 1 or 2 big games in a week can drive multiple spiked performances from its players. Anecdotally from doing hundreds of MLB Best Ball drafts over the past couple of seasons, the field is not stacking enough. Not NEARLY enough. The majority of rosters I see drafted are completely unstacked or have just 1 or 2 groups of 2 players from the same team. You don’t need a team’s entire lineup on every build, but you should look to stack more aggressively than that as stacking a strong play to capture upside and it’s also a contrarian way to build rosters until the field catches on here.

One of the interesting dynamics about MLB Best Ball compared to NFL is that there are more players who have actual big-league jobs who don’t get drafted. This is because MLB teams have 5 pitchers and 8 starting position players (if you don’t count catchers, who I rarely draft because they don’t get full-time at bats). That’s 13 players per team times 32 teams. You can dump a few obviously bad players and part-time platoon guys, but you’re still left with more players than there are total combined roster spots in a draft. When you add in prospects who might get called up early enough to be impactful in the season, there are more “playable” players than there are roster spots, which means there are a lot of guys going undrafted in most drafts who could really make an impact. 

In every Best Ball format you’ll hear advice to “scroll down” at the end of the draft. The point here is that if you’re looking at a 19th or 20th round pick, these guys are all inherently pretty thin. A guy who’s picked up in 90% of drafts might project very slightly better than a guy who’s picked up in only 10% of drafts, but this is where simple game theory comes into play. The guy who’s only on 10% of rosters will outperform the guy who’s almost always drafted 40-45% of the time, and when he does, you’re positioned to benefit because nobody else has him. If that outperformance happens to come in a big spike week in the playoffs, that’s the kind of thing that can be key to taking down a tournament.