Gary Gustafson 
Welcome to the Friday edition of MLB DFS Picks and Pivots where we dive into the top fantasy baseball plays and slate strategy to help you take down tournaments all season long at Win Daily Sports!
If you are new to MLB DFS Picks and Pivots, the goal of this article is not simply to list out the “best plays” but rather walk through the context of the slate and help you identify the best arms and stacks to build around for MLB DFS tournament play. We will use DraftKings pricing as our anchor and help you get a head start on your winning builds!
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots: Main Slate Breakdown
We have ourselves a monster 14 game MLB DFS Main Slate here on Friday Night with some rain risk primarily in St. Louis and a whole lot of ace level arms to sort through in our MLB DFS plays.
Now – my man Adam Strangis does such an incredible job every day breaking down the arms in our Starting Rotation piece – literally, there is not a better read in the industry. I bring this up before I talk about pitching because he went in depth in ways on this slate that frankly, I would not have even thought to.
The main reason for me, is that I opened this slate and saw Jacob deGrom and Tyler Glasnow both at reasonable price points and my mind went to how do I get both and the bats I want?
Now, this is not to say the other arms are not viable, of course, they are. However, my strategy when it comes to my MLB DFS Picks is a consistent one as it relates to arms. When we have slates without obvious options, I am willing to dig deeper and take risks (see Justin Dunn last night) – but when we have arguably the top two strikeout arms in baseball on the slate, why would I not anchor to them when I can fit them both and still have $3.6-$3.7K per bat for my lineup?
We see it over and over again, picking bats for MLB DFS is incredibly variant on a night to night basis and so tonight with 14 games on tap, 28 teams in the player pool – it would seem like the perfect spot to draw from that large pool of talent to find stacks that work around the double aces.
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Stacking Around Double Aces
I am sure Steven Matz is a nice guy – listen, as a Mets fan, I have a soft spot for him and even more so his grandfather – a lifelong Mets fan who had the most perfect reactions to Matz first game as a member of his childhood team.
So I am not picking ON him per se – this is more a result of years of watching Matz struggle with consistency for the Mets and then to see this red-hot start for the Blue Jays and wonder, is it real or will the Jekyl/Hyde Matz I have seen rear its ugly head sooner than later?
One of the reasons I LOVE MLB DFS is because the analytics behind it and the ability to really deep dive is unlike any other sport we have. You can get lost in data and there are tons of great FREE sites like Baseball Savant which allows you to dig into pitch data like you see above and compare year over year offerings for pitchers.
If you look at Matz’s pitch data, there are subtle changes – relying on the splitter a tad less and utilizing his slider more, at a higher velocity, which has become a nice swing and miss pitch for the lefty.
One of the biggest differences is Matz is really limiting hard contact – drastically so – just 23% this year which is a stark comparison to his 40% mark last year and 37% mark the year before.
On the flip side – there are MASSIVE red flags that Matz has been more lucky than anything else.
First – he has an 89% left on base rate and a .190 BABIP mark – the league average of which is 72% and .283. Secondly, there is a HUGE difference in his O-Contact% this year compared to his historical data points and the league overall.
O-Contact% is essentially defined as the number of times an opposing batter makes contact with pitches outside the strike zone. The league average this season is 62%, nearly identical to the 2020 mark of 61.4%. Matz meanwhile has career marks of 65.7% since 2015 – largely in line with the metrics we noted league-wide.
This year however, he is at just 48.6% – a mark in baseball that would align him with guys like deGrom, Glasnow, Kershaw and Bauer.
I am not telling you that Matz is a bad pitcher, but the truth is – his career marks would tell you he is league average and his history would also tell you he has blow up outings where the long ball becomes a massive problem for him.
Tonight against the Tampa Bay Rays – Matz steps into another boom or bust spot, as the Rays are a heavy K team with a 25-26% K rate in the projected lineup, but they are also one with 6 hitters sporting .200+ ISO marks and 40%+ hard contact rates against LHP since 2019.
If you look at the Rays bats from the right side against the sinker/change-up, the two that profile the best are Mike Brosseau and Manuel Margot while Austin Meadows looks like an elite L/L play here. Meadows has a .333 ISO and 45% HC rate against the sinker with a .333 ISO mark and 67% HC rate against the change which represents nearly 95% of the pitch mix for Matz against LHB.
I do not expect the Rays will be a popular stack today in the slightest as I do not think folks are ready to pick on Matz quite yet and with a game in Coors, we know where the hitting ownership goes, but if regression season begins tonight – well, we could get a low owned stack that has the metrics to take some serious advantage.
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap Up
This is an amazing slate – we have elite high K arms and a game in Coors Field which is going to mean some concentrated ownership in spots but I also think it will give us the opportunity to attack some low owned GPP difference makers.
My guess is that most go with EITHER deGrom or Glasnow with a cheaper SP2 to get in Coors bats, which is exactly why I want to go double aces if that path will be contrarian and I think we have a clear cheap stack to attack that can provide the power upside along with those power arms!
Enjoy this slate – let’s get in our FREE Discord today and chat it up while we dig through our cheat sheets and custom projections here at Win Daily to set up the start of this MLB DFS season with some big wins!
Make sure you follow me on Twitter at @2LockSports and be sure to sign up for an ALL ACCESS GOLD ACCOUNT account here at Win Daily Sports. Gain access to our Projection Models and jump into our Discord where we will have our experts talking plays across every sport and slate!
