The First Step in Choosing Hitters.

Daily Fantasy would be easy if you could just pick the best players.  But it would also be less fun as too many teams would just opt for Mike Trout and Giancarlo Stanton everyday.   So they use what's known as salary cap pricing to force players to make more difficult decisions. Sure, it's not really fantasy baseball, but it's much more fun and challenging than just having the great players cancel each other out.

The First thing you need to know is that it is impossible to field a decent lineup without an understanding of player value.  If you don't pick a few underpriced players, you are not going to just find it difficult to field a competitive lineup, but it is often impossible to field any lineup.

I put this chart together to illustrate the basic concepts you need to understand value:

DFS Site	Draft Kings	Fan Duel
Salary Cap	$50,000	$35,000
Number of Players	10 (2 Pitchers)	9 (1 Pitcher)
Typical Pitcher Cost*	$20,000	$10,000
Remaining Salary	$30,000	$25,000
Average remaining per hitter	$3,750	$3,125
Hitters at Average Cost.	Seth Smith, Nori Aoki	Avisail Garcia, Cameron Maybin
Top Hitter Cost	$5,900 (Bryce Harper)**	$5,600 (Paul Goldschmidt)**
Minimum Hitter Cost	$2,000	$2,200
Minimum Cost Hitters	Rafael Ynoa, Cameron Rupp	Junior Lake, Paulo Orlando

*Pitcher cost can vary day by day, but getting good pitching is so important, you will find yourself paying about this number or more on most days.  On occasion, there will be good pitchers below this value, allowing more funds for hitters.

**Top cost player for 6/14/2015.  Changes daily, but rough approximation for any given day.

On both sites, you need to use remaining funds after pitchers to field 8 hitters.  As both sites round player cost to the nearest hundred, I listed a player at the round number just below and just above the average, who I'll admit to having played and produced something.  

You really can't make a good lineup with 8 league average cost players [On FanDuel, because of the smaller range of pricing, fielding a decent "average team is more likely].  An average team may be great from time to time given the arbitrary nature of baseball scoring, but it's certainly not something you are going to have enough faith to put too much money on.  You're going to want to field some better, higher-cost hitters, which means you are going to have to play some guys who aren't as good as even Cameron Maybin or Nori Aoki.  In fact, if you want to field the top hitter, you are going to have to grab two or three below average value plays to get the likes of Goldschmidt, Trout, Stanton, or Harper on your team. 

In order to be competitive, however, you're going to need production from your whole team.  Or, at minimum, the possibility of production from all eight of your hitters.  I hear "experts" say things like "I almost always field Ryan Raburn versus a weak lefty." or "with the injury to Zack Cozart, you might want to take a good long look at Eugenio Suarez."  The names bandied about are no where close to household names, but they are the keys to a successful DFS lineup, simply because they are cheap.  This is at the core of my advice:

After selecting your pitcher (or pitchers), the second step is to fill out the bulk of your roster with cheap players.

When you build your roster, start from the cheapest player and work your way up.  Someone recommended to do it from the "All Players" [Fan Duel] or "All Hitters" [Draft Kings] tab, as it gives you a better sense of the relative player values.  You should typically field 6 of your 8 hitters from these cheap seats.  Of course, you'll replace as many as half of them as you get a sense of your remaining funds later, but this is the place to start.  Typically, I like to choose every position except 1 OF slot and I often skip 1B, as the best values tend to come from OF and C.  When I look at starting lineups, I don't get excited because Jose Reyes or Corey Dickerson are coming off the Disabled List, what is exciting is Jose Lobaton, Jordan Pacheco, or Carlos Corporan getting the start at Catcher versus a weaker pitcher or someone like Corey Spangenberg or Chris Coghlan being listed at their teams leadoff hitter that day.  We all want to play some high calibre players everyday, a thorough understanding of batters who can be productive for less than $3,000 [$2700 on FanDuel], allow you to play those guys. 

A part of that bears repeating:

A thorough understanding of batters who can be productive at cheap salaries is critical for DFS success.