Jared Levitt 
It’s Saturday and that means we’ll have a full day of baseball. I’ll be focused on the 7-game slate of MLB DFS starting at 7 pm EST. The best part of playing MLB DFS is that every day is a new day. We’ll need to forget about last night’s major disappointment handed down to us by the Toronto Blue Jays. In a marvelous matchup, they were nearly no-hit. Tonight, we’ll have some interesting matchups to look at. We should be able to afford most bats as the most expensive pitcher on this slate is just $9.4k.
Let’s Dig in and make some money!
MLB DFS Aces – Main
Seth Lugo ($9k on DK) vs. Oakland Athletics
Is it too early to start talking about Seth Lugo being a legit Cy Young candidate? All he has done this season is mow down hitters. Through 9 starts, Lugo has an ERA of 1.66 and a K/9 of 7.24. Impressively, his walks are super low at just 1.81 per 9 innings. Overall, he’s having one of the finest seasons of his career. While the A’s have played much better than expected this season, they are still a below-average lineup and one that Seth Lugo should be able to dominate.
At $9k, we’re going to be getting a pitcher who faces a team that is striking out 26% of the time against righties and has just .671 OPS. This is a game where Lugo should be able to continue his impressive start to the season. Expect him to be chalky, but this may be chalk we need to eat to get to the top of the leaderboards.
Jack Flaherty ($8.9k on DK) vs. Arizona Diamondbacks
Is Jack Flaherty finally putting it all together at age 28? Flaherty has all the talent in the world but has struggled with his consistency at the Major League level. One of his biggest issues throughout his career has been walks. Over the last 2 seasons, Flaherty has had BB/9 of 5.50 and 4.12. This season? Well, this season it’s sitting at just 1.11. This has allowed him to go a little bit deeper into games and in turn, strike out more hitters.
His K/9 is all the way up to 11.65, by far the highest of his up-and-down career. He’ll look to keep the good times rolling against what has mostly been a disappointing season for the Diamondbacks. Last year’s NL Champs are just 21-24 and have been wildly inconsistent at the plate. I can see Flaherty having another dominant outing here.
Other pitchers that will be in my pool today will be Zac Gallen vs. Detroit and Walker Buehler vs. the Reds.
MLB DFS Stacks – Main
Boston Red Sox vs. Miles Mikolas
Miles Mikolas is having, statistically speaking, the worst year of his career. His ERA is the highest it has been since all the way back in 2014 with the Texas Rangers. His HR/9 are the highest they have ever been as is his hard-hit rate. He’s allowing a hard-hit rate of over 43% this season. That is an astronomical number of hard hits and something we really need to attack. Over the last month, he’s allowed 11 barrels in just 26 innings of work. That’s almost 1 every other inning.
I’m going to continue to attack him whenever I can. Most of the time, it’s working as he’s allowed 3 ER or more in 5 of his last 6 starts. With Mikolas, we want to attack him with both sides of the plate. Righty or lefty, they each have a slugging % over .500 vs. him this season.
Core Bats: Jarren Duran, Wilyer Abreu, Rafael Devers
Secondary Bats: Connor Wong, Tyler O’Neill
Value Bats: Dom Smith, Garrett Cooper, Vaughn Grissom
Kansas City Royals vs. Ross Stripling
The Royals bats have been mostly quiet of late, but that all changes tonight in a great matchup vs. Ross Stripling. I’ve never been a huge fan of Stripling and maybe that’s swaying my head tonight, but this is a game the Royals should be able to dominate in. Stripling does nothing special and he does a lot that makes us want to stack against him. If he gives up an above average amount of fly balls at 40% and he also gives up an above average amount of hard-hits at nearly 36%.
If we look a bit deeper, he’s also giving up a contact rate over 82%. So that means there are going to be a lot hard-hit fly balls I play. Good things happen with that.
Core Bats: Sal Perez, Bobby Witt, Vinnie Pasquantino
Secondary Bats: Michael Massey
Value Bats: Nelson Velazquez, Hunter Renfroe, Kyle Isbel
Other stacks I like tonight will be the Rangers vs. Patrick Sandoval, Padres vs. Bryce Elder, and Dodgers vs. Graham Ashcraft.
Make sure you follow me on Twitter at @rangerzfan79 and be sure to sign up for a PREMIUM 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!
