Underdog MLB Best Ball Strategy Guide

We’ve got a little bit of different content coming at you today! I have been drafting a bunch of teams into the Underdog “The Bullpen” MLB Best Ball contest lately, and I wanted to share the details with you all!

If you’re unaware, Underdog is a new-ish fantasy sports application/website that runs all kinds of contests. What we’re focused on today is the season-long MLB Best Ball contest, but there’s all kinds of other good baseball (and other sports, of course) action on there as well that we’ll be talking about during the season.

Since I really love their The Bullpen Best Ball contest ($5 an entry, draft up to 150 entries, big-time prizes, and super soft ADP), I took their offer to join them in a partnership.

Is this a “sell-out” situation? Sort of. I’m definitely going to be nagging you about Underdog because I make some money if you sign up and deposit with my promo code JonPGH (sign up with my link here). The good news is that

• The product is really great

• There’s an edge due to the casual nature of the games

• I will use the money I make on it to feed my kids. I know money is fungible and all but I will find some way to use that specific money to buy food for my kids.

So freaking sign up with my link and deposit some money! They match your deposit up to $100. Then you can use your money and theirs to get some competitive teams into this Best Ball contest.

The rest of this post will be dedicated to The Bullpen contest, we’ll go over the rules and the scoring system and then I’ll provide the biggest misprices I’ve found from comparing my projections to the current ADP over there.

What Is It

Full rules are here.

Long story short, you join a league of 12 players and draft 20 players. You compete to score the most points in your league. The first “round” is weeks 1-18, and at the end of that week - the top three teams in each league advance to the next round. Then there are three more rounds, each covering two weeks, with the lowest scoring teams eliminated each time. At the end, there’s a final standings and you get paid based on that (top prize is $10,000).

There are no trades, waivers, or benches. You draft your team and your score is determined by your best players at the end of each round. Of your 20 players, they take the scores of your top 3 pitchers, top 3 outfielders, top 3 infielders, and then your next best hitter (flex) and add all of them up to determine your score. That means your worst scores get dropped - which takes away some of the risks from drafting a deGrom-type guy - if he goes on the IL immediately you don’t really absorb the zeroes - you just depend on the other guys to take his spot.

What I really like is the eight-hour clock slow drafts. You can draft a squad at your leisure, there’s not a time you have to sit down and draft a team in an hour or two. You can just always have a draft going and take your time with each pick.

Scoring System

Pitchers

Win = 5 points
Quality Start = 5 points
Strikeout = 3 points
Earned Run = -3 points
Inning Pitched = 3 points

Hitters

1B = 3 points
2B = 5 points
3B = 8 points
HR = 10 points
BB = 3 points
HBP = 3 points
RBI = 2 points
R = 2 points
SB = 4 points

This scoring system is pretty similar to DraftKings, so if you play there you have a pretty good idea. One difference is the quality start and win bonuses being five points. If you get a pitcher that gives you a QS and a W in an outing that’s 10 points, pretty significant. However, it’s still pretty heavy on strikeouts.

On the hitting side, we’re a little bit lighter on steals with just four points there, and we love the long ball here. A dinger will give you at least 14 points (with the R and RBI), a grand slam gives you 20 (10+2+8).

We don’t have to get too bogged down in analyzing the scoring system since the projections will do that for us.

Hitting Position Strategy

One thing that will go a long way is to get a good feel of how infield and outfield separate. There are just two positions for hitters, so it’s easy to get a feel on the distributions here - and it’s a big edge as well.

The first thing we notice by my projections is that the top five projected scorers and seven of the top 9 are outfielders. That is a lot of outfield points right at the top.

The high-scoring outfielders seem to be pinched toward the very top of the list, most of them are going right away.

I’ve grouped all hitters into groups of 12 based on my projected score for them (so my top 12 hitters are in group 1, 13-24 in group 2, etc.), and then I made this to show how the positions split:

The only groups that outfielders win are the first and third. It’s a fairly even split in the top 36 hitters (19 infielders, 17 outfielders), and after that - infielders dominate.

It makes sense that there would just be more infielders to choose from since the infield represents five starting spots (C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS) and outfield represents just three.

Of the top 100 hitters, 63 are infielders. Here’s a full breakdown of that

Top 50: 58% infielders
Top 100: 63% infielders
Top 150: 63% infielders
Top 200: 62% infielders
Top 250: 62% infielders
Top 300: 61% infielders

All of this means that you want to get outfielders early. You are starting the same amount of outfielders and infielders, but there are more infielders for the taking - so there’s a lot more room for error in the infield. I am starting most of my drafts with two outfielders right away.

Pitcher Strategy

Your entire pitching score will come from three players in each scoring period (3 pitchers, 7 hitters count). That suggests that we should draft fewer SPs than hitters, but it’s really not that simple.

This is a volume game. There were 4,860 games started last year, and the average SP point total using this scoring system was 26 points. 94.4% of starts resulted in positive points scored. If your team does not have three good pitchers on it that make really close to the maximum number of possible starts, you’re not going to be competitive.

Since pitchers get injured more often than hitters, it makes sense to have plenty of backups.

By my calculations, Sandy Alcantara led the league in Underdog Points last year with 1,323 in his 32 starts. The top 9 scoring pitchers all made 31, 32, or 33 starts. Only three pitchers in the top 20 got there with fewer than 30 starts - Ohtani (28), Verlander (28), and McClanahan (28). One trip to the IL costs you big time. We should be drafting at least 7 SPs, and trying to get all guys with good strikeout rates.

I checked the correlations between all of our input categories (starts, innings, strikeouts, wins, quality starts, and earned runs allowed) and saw how they correlated with overall points scored. Here are those coefficients:

GS: .95
IP: .97
K: .99
W: .94
QS: .95
ER: .82

Strikeouts are the most important thing. Of course, you can’t strike out a ton of hitters without throwing a ton of innings. It would be fair to say that innings is actually the most important thing therefore, but innings are way tougher to predict than strikeouts. We should really favor strikeout pitchers (pitchers with a K% above 28% or a K/9 above 10).

Tiers

I did some rough tiering of my SP projections based on the drop-off in projection. We find seven guys in the top two tiers:

Tier 1: Cole, Burnes, deGrom
Tier 2: Scherzer, Alcantara, Bieber, Nola

deGrom is obviously terrifying with his elbow history, so I’m not sure I’d even go there given how important it is going to be for us for him to stay on the field. That gives us a pretty limited “elite” tier when twelve team are drafting. I would like to get my hands on one of these guys if possible, but it’s probably not as important to me as getting after the outfield early on.

That’s because the next tiers are huge. I find 20 SPs in tier 3 and then 23 more in tier 4. The top four tiers are 50 pitchers. The top projected guy is Cole with 1,293 and #50 is Luis Garica at 908 projected points. That’s a pretty huge difference, so it’s not like you want to wait until 25 pitchers are off the board to start pulling the trigger, but there is plenty to like in the 10-30 range.

Misranked Players

I am giving all of my subscribers here the full projections and ranks, but I will hit some of the biggest standouts in terms of Underdog ADP here.

The format for the below is this:

Player (My Rank vs. ADP Rank)

And the rank and ADP rank are split up between hitters and pitchers, so when I say someone is my #10 player I mean they are my #10 hitter or #10 pitcher - not #10 overall player - and the same is true with ADP rank.

Hitters

Nolan Arenado (16 vs. 31)
Marcus Semien (22 vs. 32)
Teoscar Hernandez (28 vs. 41)
Dansby Swanson (30 vs. 57)
Jazz Chisholm (34 vs. 62)
Willy Adames (36 vs. 66)
Tommy Edman (48 vs. 73)
Christian Walker (49 vs. 69)
Matt Chapman (51 vs. 88)
Ryan Mountcastle (50 vs. 98)
Tim Anderson (53 vs. 83)
Amed Rosario (56 vs. 122)
Jorge Polanco (61 vs. 108)
Eugenio Suarez (62 vs. 101)
Salvador Perez (72 vs. 118)
Rowdy Tellez (81 vs. 116)
Luis Arraez (96 vs. 136)
Brendan Rodgers (104 vs. 164)

Pitchers

Robbie Ray (9 vs. 19)
Alek Manoah (11 vs. 18)
Lance Lynn (24 vs. 41)
Jordan Montgomery (30 vs. 50)
German Marquez (37 vs. 69)
Tyler Anderson (38 vs. 70)
Drew Rasmussen (47 vs. 68)
Kyle Gibson (54 vs. 82)
Cole Irvin (63 vs. 96)
Josiah Gray (67 vs. 88)

On the pitcher side, that’s a little bit tougher to trust because so much of it is based on how many innings we’re projecting - which is really tough to do. You probably don’t want to draft Marquez/Gibson/Irvin/Gray even though the projections “like” them here - they’re only up on the list because of the confident IP projections. But yeah, I really like drafting the first several guys there.

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Projections and Ranks

Hitter Projections & Ranks

Pitcher Projections & Ranks

Sample Team

Here’s a draft I did the other day using this strategy. I was working out while I did it so it was a little bit half-assed, but I think it turned out okay and gives you a good idea of how I’m attacking it and how it can turn out. I had 10th pick and went like this

1. Kyle Tucker OF

2. Kyle Schwarber OF

3. Max Scherzer SP

4. Luis Robert OF

5. Ozzie Albies IF

6. Max Fried SP

7. Oneil Cruz IF

8. Zac Gallen SP

9. Anthony Rizzo IF

10. Lance Lynn SP

11. Riley Greene OF

12. Freddy Peralta SP

13. Andres Gimenez IF

14. Seth Brown OF

15. Austin Meadows OF

16. Javier Baez IF

17. Bryan De La Cruz OF

18. Jose Miranda IF

19. Aaron Ashby SP

20. Carlos Carrasco SP

7 P
6 IF
7 OF

It’s probably too much risk at SP with the old guys (Scherzer, Lynn, Carrasco), the injury prone Peralta, and Ashby who doesn’t even have a rotation job right now - but all of those guys can pile up some innings and strikeouts if they’re healthy and they are mostly on good teams. I loaded up quickly on two elite outfielders and then went with some HR/SB upside guys like Robert, Albies, Cruz, and Gimenez.

Conclusion

So that’s it, some tips on Underdog best ball drafts. If you’re not a member, use my link or promo code JonPGH to get some free money when you open your account - and rest easy tonight knowing you bought my kids a can of beans.

And hit me up if you sign up - we can time up some drafts together! I’ll also be tuning my in-season daily projections to some of the other drafts & action they have during the season, I’m pretty confident we can make some money on all of the games they have there. Thanks for reading, see ya next time!