Swinging for the Fences: A Retrospective Review of The Dinger 2023

Author: Billy Jones

Introduction

What’s up fantasy sports fam? Welcome back to my blog. It’s great to be back writing again after a brief hiatus, as I have been full send on creating and publishing fantasy football visualizations on Twitter and bought a house. Today, I am excited to reconnect with you all by diving into the sport that is my true love, baseball, through a retrospective review of The Dinger 2023 hosted by Underdog Fantasy data. 

Although I sat out this tournament last year, I'm gearing up to launch multiple entries in the upcoming 2024 tournaments. But before I dive headfirst into the action, I thought it prudent to dissect the meta from the previous year. Understanding the dynamics, strategies, and outcomes from the 2023 event will undoubtedly provide me with valuable insights to fine-tune my approach for the upcoming competitions.

While this exercise is primarily retrospective and descriptive in nature, mining insights from the past can be the catalyst for crafting winning strategies in the future. So, join me as I dissect the data, unravel the intricacies, and pave the way for a strategic game plan that's poised for success in the upcoming tournaments. Let's jump into the numbers and uncover the secrets that will shape my winning strategy for the challenges ahead. Ready for the journey? Let's get started! 

The Dinger Basics

For those who may be less familiar with The Dinger by Underdog and the Best Ball format, it’s a unique and increasingly popular fantasy format where participants draft a team and then have no in-season management requirements like waiver wire additions or setting lineups. Instead, the highest-scoring players are automatically placed in the starting lineup each week, and leagues are decided based on cumulative season points rather than head-to-head matchups.

The Dinger takes best ball to another level with its distinct two-stage structure: the regular season and playoffs. During the regular season, teams compete against others in their draft, with the top two teams advancing to the playoffs. The playoffs then consist of a series of two-week DFS-style competitions, where teams from different drafts, potentially with overlapping players to your roster, vie for advancement to the next round.

Additional specifics about The Dinger's roster settings, scoring, schedule, etc. can be found on Underdog's website.

Data Source

Let’s start things off with a bit of schmoozing by an independent creator. Thank you, Underdog Fantasy, for making the data from the past year’s contests publicly on your website. As a data driven guy, I am not sure I would be firing at this year’s tournaments without the ability to look into prior year’s results. This is largely why I drafted so few Double Dribble Basketball Best Ball teams. 

The scope of this investigation will center on The Dinger 2023 contest, which boasted 54,984 entries across 4,582 drafts. In stark contrast, the 2022 iteration featured a more modest 4,512 entries distributed over 376 drafts. Given the substantial difference in sample size, the focus for this piece is naturally directed toward the more robust 2023 dataset. However, it's worth noting that the findings were consistent with the trends noted below. If you're curious to delve into these visuals despite the inherent small sample size, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, and I'll be more than happy to share the visualizations. 

Positional Contribution by ADP

Best Ball is all about accumulating fantasy points. To kick off the analysis, I juxtapose player Average Draft Position (ADP) against their average best ball points, in an effort to visualize positional contribution tiers.

Outfielder performance in 2023 closely mirrored ADP, with a near linear decline in points as the draft progressed. Infielders exhibited a similar trend initially but plateaued early in the draft, around pick 90, maintaining consistency for the subsequent 70 picks. In contrast, pitcher point contribution remained remarkably flat, emphasizing the replaceability of top tier pitcher’s production with the mid to later round draft picks. In drawing parallels to the realm of fantasy football, outfielders were like wide receivers, whose ADP seems quite efficient throughout the draft and have a steady decline in production as the draft progresses. Additionally, infielders were like running backs where the top-tier infielders showcase elite performance, however, there being a discernible tier of similar production that emerged mid-way in the draft. Pitchers, in this exercise, align themselves quarterbacks/tight ends. Unlike hitters, where elites significantly separated from mid and late round options, elite pitchers were remarkably unremarkable in terms of point contribution separation at the top of the draft.

Roster Construction

Let's switch the conversation to roster construction, to discuss which combination of pitchers, infielders, and outfielders resulted in the most optimal outcomes for each team.

The above results encapsulate all roster construction types with 400 entries or more, with any other configurations grouped under the umbrella of "Other." Notably, the "Other" category exhibited atrocious performance, prompting refining the visualization analysis to exclude these edge cases to enhance the clarity of our findings.

Last year unveiled a clear set of optimal builds, all operating well above the expected base advance rate of 16.67% (2 out of 12). Balanced configurations of 6-7-7, 7-7-6, 7-6-7, 8-6-6, and 6-8-6 outshone others, showcasing a strategic edge of keeping it simple. It's worth highlighting that the 6-6-8 build, while technically a balanced structure, operated below expected advance rates, a trend I believe attributed to the likely alignment of this build with the "punt outfield" strategy. The remaining unbalanced builds operated well below expected advance rates. 

Zooming in on the top of the draft, specific roster constructions in the initial five rounds demonstrated a substantial edge over the expected advance rate. At the whole draft level, we saw the balance base construction operate most optimally but only marginally above the expected advance rate. When reviewing the first 5 rounds of the draft, we see certain roster constructions operating with a much greater edge over the expected advance rate.

0-3-2 (24.25% - 16.67% = 7.58% / 16.67% = 45% over expected), 0-2-3 (39% over expected), 0-1-4 (36% over expected), 1-1-3 (21% over expected), 1-2-2 (19% over expected), and 0-4-1 (16% over expected) all operated at greater than a 15% over the expected advance rate. These results show a very clear optimal draft strategy from last year’s results. A balanced attack of hitters while minimal to zero investment at pitcher was very clear a plus to the expected value of a draft entry. 0-3-2, 0-2-3, 0-1-4, and 0-4-1 combined for 7,388 entries (13% of all entrants) and advanced at a whopping 23.12% rate compared to teams with 2+ pitchers combined for 27,079 entries (49% of all entrants) which advanced at an atrocious 14.03% rate.

Drafting Specifics

Transitioning to drafting specifics, the "Winks Chart" offers insights into the optimal drafting path for infielders, outfielders, and pitchers. These visuals, inspired by Hayden Winks’ of Underdog Fantasy When To Draft WRs In Best Ball, present the advance rate of teams who selected n cumulative players of that position through a given round. 

The optimal draft path for pitchers was the punt pitcher build. The sweet spot was refraining from selecting any pitchers through the first five rounds, but ANY strategy that involved zero pitchers before the 10th round outperformed the expected advance rate. From there, an effective pitching strategy involved a concentrated effort in the mid-rounds, ideally securing the sixth pitcher by round 13/14 and adding 1 more in the later rounds. Concluding the draft with 6 or 7 pitchers proved optimal, while having 8 pitchers meet expectations, and any other configuration tended to be detrimental to one's advance rate.

Contrastingly, drafting infielders and outfielders early proved to be the key to success. Beginning with infielders, the optimal path was not drafting an infielder in the first round but adding 1 to 3 infielders in rounds 2-5. After this phase, the optimal approach was to hold off selecting an infielder during the 'infielder deadzone', and, instead, filling out this position towards the end of the draft. 

To wrap up the positional Winks charts, let’s discuss what was optimal for build outfielder rooms. The advance rates for teams steadily decrease for every outfielder not added through the early/middle rounds of the draft. The optimal was drafting 5 through the first 8-10 rounds as falling behind at this position or "detouring" to too many pitchers and infielders caused teams to operate significantly below the expected advance rate.

Advance Rate Heroes

Let's tip our caps to the standout performers of 2023, acknowledging those players who truly dominated The Dinger 2023 contest. Last year, a select group emerged as the advance rate heroes, with Ronald Acuña, Shohei Ohtani, Matt Olson, and Zac Gallen leading the pack. Each of these players boasted advance rates surpassing 30%, with Acuña claiming the crown with an impressive 46.53% advance rate.

Taking the player level advance rate heroes analysis a step further, I conducted an association rule mining analysis—an insightful technique that delves into combinatorial rules. If you're unfamiliar with this concept, I discussed it in detail in a previous post during the summer, utilizing Best Ball Mania data. 

Here are the top five advance rate combinations (min. 60 combinations):

1) {Lane Thomas, Ronald Acuña} => 74.77% - 163 occurrences

2) {Matt Olson, Ronald Acuña} => 68.82% - 702 occurrences

3) {Kevin Gausman, Ronald Acuña} => 67.61% - 96 occurrences

4) {Josh Naylor, Matt Olson} => 67.03% - 61 occurrences

5) {Ronald Acuña, Zac Gallen} => 66.72% - 415 occurrences

Conclusion

That’s a wrap for my retrospective review of The Dinger 2023 tournament. I hope you found this helpful and has provided you with a foundation for crafting your winning strategies for the upcoming 2024 season. Stay tuned for more fantasy sports analysis but until then, may your fantasy teams thrive, and your player takes never be wrong!