Each Daily Fantasy Sports site has their own scoring with their own little intricacies, although the majority of settings are similar across the board. The largest difference offensively is that some daily fantasy sports sites penalize hitters a fraction of a point for every out they make without additional deductions for strikeouts. Other sites penalize for strikeouts instead of outs made. This got me wondering how the scoring differences affect the value of the most extreme TTO hitters. For a complete breakdown of baseball scoring on the daily fantasy sports sites read our Roster Size and Scoring by Site article.

If you’re unfamiliar with the subject, TTO stands for Three True Outcomes, which are Walks, Strikeouts, and Home Runs. They are called so because they are independent of defense. It’s just man vs. man, hitter vs. pitcher. The most obvious TTO hitter and the one who put this question in my head is Adam Dunn. Dunn is on pace to have the greatest TTO outcome season of all time. Some other examples of extreme TTO hitters are Carlos Pena and Jim Thome who usually have this result somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 45 percent of their Plate Appearances throughout most of their careers. Dunn has had a TTO outcome an absurd 59.9% of the time in 2012 (through 7/29). That means, for every 10 times he comes to the plate, he only has to run to 1st Base 4 times. As I joked on Twitter recently, he must be the most well rested everyday player in all of baseball. He walks 17.9% of the time, strikes out 34.7% of the time, and Homers another 7.2% of the time.

While I’d rather use 2 actual daily fantasy sports sites in my upcoming example , the truth is that there are no 2 that have exactly the same scoring outside outs and strikeouts, meaning you’d end up with different point per dollar (PP$) goals anyway. So for our purposes, let’s create 2 fictional scoring systems where HR’s (4), Singles (1), BB’s (1) are all the same and ‘DFS A’ deducts for Outs (.25), while ‘DFS B’ deducts for K’s (1) only. RBI’s and Runs don’t matter because they’re worth the same on both sites.

In addition, let’s round off our TTO player to make it extremely easy on the math. I don’t even want to use a calculator or have you feel the need to use one to check my math. In 20 PA’s, we’re going to say our TTO hitter walks 3 times, strikes out 5 times, and homers once (that’s about 30 homeruns over 600 PA’s). This gives us 45%, which will often lead the league, but is still far less than Adam Dunn in 2012. This nice number also keeps us from having to fractionalize things. If you want to increase PA’s or deduct half a BB, K, or HR be my guest. Let’s also give him 3 singles for a .235 batting average (4 for 17) because TTO hitters strike out so often that they rarely hit much higher than .250. Again, we’re not going to worry about RBI’s and Runs.

DFS A - 3 pts (3 BB*1) + 4 pts (1 HR*4) + 3 pts (3 S*1) – 3.25 pts (13 outs*0.25) = 6.75 pts

DFS B – 3 pts (3 BB*1) + 4 pts (1 HR*4) + 3 pts (3 S*1) – 5 pts (5 K*1) = 5 pts

It looks like my assumption (which I hadn’t shared with you previously in this article for fear of being wrong) was correct, that TTO hitters may be more valuable on “Out” penalizing sites than they are on “Strikeout” penalizing sites. Now I say may be more valuable instead of are more valuable because I would expect that sites compensate for this in their pricing. Although I have no idea how various sites compute their pricing, I would imagine that points per game (PPG) would have something to do with it.

That doesn’t mean that everything I just spent the last hour researching and writing about TTO hitters is meaningless. How many daily fantasy players play multiple sites? How many of those players just see player A facing pitcher B in park C and come up with a blanket determination of whether that player is useful that day or not for Daily Fantasy Baseball purposes? If you were the type of person to do so, you’d be at a disadvantage against someone valuing players specifically for the one daily fantasy sports site they play on. You have to properly value players specifically for each different site you play on in a given day and TTO players are probably the most extreme example of this.

To finish this off, let’s see how the monster himself scores on our fictional sites across 20 PA’s. I know I said I wouldn’t work with fractions and use a calculator, but I’m really curious.

DFS A – 3.6 pts (3.6 BB*1) + 7.2 pts (1.8 HR*4) + 3.4 pts (1.7 S*1 – he’s hitting .215) – 3.23 pts (12.9 outs*0.25) = 10.97 pts

DFS B – 3.6 pts (3.6 BB*1) + 7.2 pts (1.8 HR*4) + 3.4 pts (1.7 S*1) – 7 pts (7 K*1) = 7.2 pts

Wow, that’s a huge difference! It seems that the more extreme TTO a player is, especially the higher the OBP and K%, the bigger the difference in the result is going to be between an “Out” DFS site and a “Strikeout” site. This backs up my assertion even more that you can’t just make blanket decisions on players across multiple sites.

If someone’s done further research on the subject, I would love to hear their conclusions even if, and especially if, they differed from those presented here. I also wonder if and how the daily fantasy sports sites factor TTO into their pricing model. That’s a topic for future research though. For now I know one thing for sure: Adam Dunn is worth a heck of a lot more on an “Out” site than a “Strikeout” site!