Those of us who play daily fantasy baseball contests seriously spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the weather. So who better to profile and interview than a meteorologist who happens to be a regular on Fanduel!?! Andy Rice is 31 year old Data and Software Product Manager for a private weather forecasting company. He also plays regularly on Fanduel as ‘andywxman’.
Fanduel: How long have you been playing in daily fantasy contests, and how did you first find out about them?
Andy: I’ve been playing full season fantasy baseball for years. Every spring, I go tornado chasing for a week with one of my buddies. That involves a lot of driving, and while we were listening to baseball on the radio, he told me that I should check out the daily contests on Fanduel.
Fanduel: What sports other than baseball do you follow, and do you play more traditional formats of fantasy games for any sports?
Andy: Baseball is a definite #1. College Football is a more distant #2, and NFL #3. I am in a couple of fantasy baseball leagues: a mixed H2H, and a really deep NL-only Roto keeper league.
Fanduel: How have your results been so far at Fanduel?
Andy: All over the place! At first I had no idea what I was doing. I was just picking players that I would normally pick in my seasonal league, and so I was losing more than I was winning. Now I am much more selective. If I haven’t really researched the matchups I won’t put money on the table. My success rate seems to have improved.
Fanduel: What are some key aspects of strategy that you use when picking a team for the day?
Andy: I’m definitely a stat geek. I generally do a decent amount of research before putting money on the line. I’ll look at recent performance, how well the rest of the player’s team has been doing, how well the pitcher they are facing has been doing, the righty/lefty factor, and the direct batter pitcher matchups. Once I have a team picked, I’ll run a sanity check on injuries and of course…the weather.
Fanduel: What’s your favorite thing about playing in the daily contests on Fanduel?
Andy: It actually makes me better in my full season head to head league, because I have a better sense of the matchups each day. I also like the real time chat, since it’s a good real time discussion of the activity around baseball.
Fanduel: What’s something that you think could be even better about Fanduel in the future?
Andy: I would love to see real time statistics with respect to the daily leaderboard. I think it would be fun for bragging rights to see the top 10 scores for the day at any given time. I also think it would be cool to see the top players at each position update in real time so you could see the daily “dream team”.
Fanduel: What are your thoughts on the importance of weather in daily fantasy contests?
Andy: Weather can have a big impact on sports, and my job has put me in a good position to look for correlations. The obvious one when it comes to daily contests is rain delays/cancelations. When I did the research I was actually very surprised to see how rare it is to have a baseball game rained out. There are usually somewhere between 25-45 games postponed due to weather out of 2,700 games played per year. That’s 1-2%, so it’s kind of funny when I see people getting so concerned about it in the chat room. Rain Delays are a different story and happen more frequently. Their impact is mainly on the starting pitcher, since they tend to get pulled after a lengthy delay.
There are some deeper weather impacts on the game too. Weather changes drastically during the spring and fall months, so that might be used to gain an edge, but I’ve only begun to scratch the surface. I did some research that showed that Prince Fielder’s batting average was almost 100 points higher when the temperature was over 70 degrees. I found that interesting and it led me to a do a more thorough study.
Here are the league-wide batting averages in various temperatures for MLB for 2009:
30s: .250
40s: .261
50s: .260
60s: .257
70s: .263
80s: .271
90s: .274
100s:.262
So I guess hitters like it really warm, but not Arizona hot.
Wind obviously plays a big role in some parks. I did an analysis of Wrigley Field for the 2009 season. In 12 games with the wind blowing out, the average runs scored was almost 12. In 48 games with the wind blowing in, the average runs scored was well below 9.
Now we all had a gut feeling that the wind blowing out at Wrigley adds to runs, but when you look at the raw numbers, it’s striking!
Fanduel: To whatever extent you do factor weather into your picks, are you using any of your unique knowledge as a meteorologist, or are you reading the same weather reports that the rest of us read?
Andy: I have a lot of great tools in my arsenal when it comes to the rainfall forecast for each day. I would say that I’m not looking at the same sources of information that the average fantasy player is looking at for my weather information.
From a meteorologists perspective a rainout is pretty obvious. You know it when you see it. I used to work at one of the TV stations in Philadelphia as a weather producer. It was always fun trying to make the call as to whether the game was going to happen, so I got a lot of practice. Because of the gate revenue, most MLB teams will really try to get the game in unless it’s just awful with no chance of the rain moving away.
Fanduel: Does your training as a meteorologist involve any statistical analysis or forecasting techniques that give you an edge in other aspects of making picks for daily contests?
Andy: In these daily leagues you know that not all of your players are going to have an amazing day, but if your pitcher wins and you get 3 or 4 hitters that have a good day, you have a really good chance of winning. So you need to give yourself a team of batters with an increased probability of having a big day and hope a few hit. If I have two players that I view equally, and one has a chance of steady rain for a few hours during the game, the probability of having a good day goes down and I’ll probably pick the guy playing in the dome.
This has been a guest interview from FanDuel themselves. We now know weather plays a big part in daily fantasy baseball, but what about fantasy football?
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