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Daily Fantasy Baseball: Do Pitchers Perform Better with More Days of Rest?

Pitching in the big leagues can put a major strain on a player's arm. Does this then mean that we should be targeting pitchers with extra rest between their starts?

By the time Friday rolls around, we've about had enough.

Our brains start to shut down, focus dwindles, and our trips to the break room stretch a wee bit longer. Fatigue has taken a toll on us, and productivity hits a low.

That's how I feel, and my job involves the strenuous (yet courageous) task of staring at spreadsheets. Can you imagine what that would do to a starting pitcher?

Thankfully, pitchers have a little built-in rest as they'll only take the mound once every five or so days. I suppose we can make such concessions to dudes who are rifling little, round spheres at roughly 95 miles per hour 100 times each start.

When you go through a routine that is as physically-demanding as pitching in the big leagues, you'd assume that more rest is better. Your arm is fresh after five days, so wouldn't it make sense that it'd be even better one day later?

This would have pretty obvious applications to daily fantasy baseball if it were true. If pitchers perform better on five days of rest than they do on four, then we should likely be targeting those guys whenever possible.

Because this website is called "numberFire" and not "narrativeFire," I begrudgingly admit that we should at least check to make sure this is true. You know, just to confirm what we already know. Our assumptions have never been wrong before, right?

Let me put it this way: it's a good thing we checked.

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