How to Use BvPs

According to Draftkings fantasy baseball rankings, Aaron Judge has the highest average for fantasy points per game. There’s quite a few reasons that lead him to being such a dominant fantasy player, but it largely has due to the fact that he is hitting Home Runs at a faster rate than anyone in the league. That is quite noticeable as Judge leads the entire league in Home Runs this year with twenty six in just a tad over senty games this year.

Now a daily fantasy baseball research tactic is to take a look back at a hitter’s history against the pitcher to determine the position he is in to capitalize on the given matchup for that day’s slate. This fantasy baseball research strategy is more formally called Batter versus pitcher or BvP for short. Why is this such a common statistic to use? It is really quite intuitive in its thinking. What is a better indicator of the present than learning from the past?

In baseball terms, if a hitter has had great success against a pitcher over his career, say a plus.300 batting average with a handful of Home Runs, then it certainly seems as if he would be an excellent position to capitalize when he faces the pitcher again. Pitcher’s stuff, in terms of nastiness and control of their pitchers, has little variation season to season and even less so game to game. So if a player has success against a pitcher in his career then more times than not the trend is going to continue the next time the two players matchup. Then again, this statistic has to be used with a grain of salt like all statistics have to be.

As two players face off against each other more and more, two things happen. First, depending on their point in their respective careers, players are either going to be declining or improving the quality of their play as seasons continue to turn over. Second, as you face a guy more and ore you begin to pick up on tendencies and weaknesses that can go either in your favor or against you. Of course, every Major League Baseball club has a plethora of scouting reports on every player for every team so they already know their supposed weaknesses and strengths to gameplan on how to attack a specific matchup. But, even more so, the data and information for a player specific matchup is undoubtedly much more useful and accurate.

So take all of these factors into account when utilizing the BvP statistic because it could lead you to the steal of the day or a big time bust that could end up earning you a big fat zero in terms of fantasy points.

Leo Aranas is an online writer and blogger.