Gary Gustafson 
Welcome to the Friday, June 11th 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 to 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!
Main Slate Breakdown
Welcome into a Friday MLB DFS Picks and Pivots where we have a monster 13 game slate staring us in the face with a plethora of aces, big dollar stacks, and some weather threatening once again the game in DC with Max Scherzer on the mound for the Nationals.
Any time we have a slate with this much top-end pitching, I think you need to understand that your builds are anchored first in this strikeout heavy upper echelon of arms. As Adam Strangis laid out in today’s Starting Rotation, the fact we have Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom, Lucas Giolito, Brandon Woodruff and Shohei Ohtani all on the same slate – you are anchoring to a subset of arms here all with 30%+ K rates and 13% swinging strike rates.
I would argue strongly that every single build you make tonight on DK has two of these arms in your build – period. Full stop.
Well let me take it a step further, every build should have Jacob deGrom in it first – and then, you pick which SP2 you want from the rest.
I say this all the time in Picks and Pivots but K’s are King and anytime we get this many elite K arms on a slate, I want to build around that certainty and ceiling as you simply cannot miss on arms when it comes to MLB DFS. I am far more willing to take the high-end arms when we have them and take chances on the high variance of batters.
The thing is – you really do not even have to look all that hard to find powerful stacks tonight that fit within the salary constructs of a “double ace” build. This is even more so the case if you opt to use Shohei Ohtani ($8.1K) as your SP2 alongside deGrom – as you have two of the best strikeout arms in baseball and still just under $4K per batter to spend on your hitters.
So where do we look for bats tonight?
Well, you clicked on this article and it is a day ending in “Y” so that means, as usual, we can go right back to the Tampa Bay Rays who never see their prices change on DraftKings, they never are owned and all they do is hit for power.
LHP Keegan Akin will take the hill in Tampa tonight and this is a lefty that has just a 17% K rate against RHB with a 44% fly ball rate and 49% hard contact rate allowed. Akin relies heavily on his change-up to RHB nearly 30% of the time and this is a pitch that has resulted in a 61% HC rate from right-handed batters this season.
All of Manuel Margot, Mike Brosseau and Mike Zunino hit the change-up from lefties well with a combined .200+ ISO mark and 40%+ HC rates. The issue for Akin is that he essentially is a two-pitch pitcher against right-handed heavy teams and his change-up actually grades out as a below-average offering so when all you have is a low 90’s fastball and a change-up AND you give up a ton of hard contact, this feels like a spot where the Rays could just put the hammer down with their right-handed heavy lineup.
Staying in this game, the Orioles makes for an intriguing mini-stack to attack the HR tendencies of LHP Ryan Yarbrough. Listen Yarbrough is coming off his best outing of the year against the Yankees and this is a ballpark downgrade for the O’s but the pricing on DK specifically has really over-adjusted in my opinion with 5 of the 9 projected starting batters on Baltimore priced below $3K.
Yarbrough for all his merits has one very clear issue – the HR ball – having surrendered 2 HR’s to the Yankees and 3 HR’s in each of his previous games against Toronto and Baltimore. As my man Jared, our FanDuel DFS expert here at WDS, pointed out in Discord – Yarbrough has given up these 8 HR’s and amazingly they are all solo shots!
So what does that tell us – this is not a spot to all-in stack the Orioles but instead you are going home run hunting with a mini-stack.
Yarbrough throws two primary offerings to RHB – a cutter nearly 50% of the time and a change-up that he tosses 35% of the time. Against the cutter, Trey Mancini (.444 ISO), Ryan Mountcastle (.500) and Freddy Galvis (.296) all stand out. Against the change, Maikel Franco (.256) and Pat Valaika (.438) jump off the page where their power metrics.
The nice part about this Orioles line-up is that really outside of Mancini, the rest of these right-handed batters noted above are all super cheap and it allows us to get the big name arms we covet.
The other spot here tonight that stands out for cheap bats in Minnesota against RHP Jose Urquidy.
The Twins have a near 5 IRT tonight and you have FIVE batters in the projected line-up priced at 2.6K or lower on DK which gives you an opportunity to stack here like we did last night with seemingly an abundance of value.
Urquidy is actually a reverse splits arm, giving up a .223 ISO to RHB versus just a .112 ISO to LHB and he is coming off his worst start of the year, his second start since coming off the IL with a shoulder injury, in which he allowed 6 ER and gave up 2 HR’s in just 4 innings against Toronto.
Urquidy relies heavily on his slider, nearly 33% of the time to RHB and this is a pitch they have hit hard – with a .333 ISO mark this season. Josh Donaldson is the bat from the right side that really jumps out as he has a .307 ISO and 43% HC rate against this pitch type from RHP.
The value really comes from a few specific bats – the combination of Trevor Larnach ($2.1K), C Ryan Jeffers ($2.5K) and 2B Nick Gordon ($2.6K) who are projected to bookend Nelson Cruz in the middle of the Twins lineup and give you some really interesting stack options that will allow you to get guys like Cruz or Donaldson alongside these cheaper pieces of the stack.
The hitting environment in Minnesota tonight looks to be elite, with 80-90 degree temperatures and 11 MPH winds blowing out and the fact you can stack this team with a combination of big bats like Cruz, Donaldson and Polanco by using the punt value in Jeffers, Larnach and Gordon – it gives you a really balanced and elite stack.
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap-Up
Stepping back and looking at this Friday Night MLB DFS Picks and Pivots slate, the outlook for me is simple and it starts with pitching. Even with the Nationals game likely a washout, we have no shortage of arms and it starts with Jacob DeGrom as our SP1 – with really my decision for SP2 likely coming down to Woodruff or Ohtani based on salary needs.
The nice part about both paths is that we have so much value in our bats to choose from across the spots in Minnesota, Baltimore and the Win Daily favorite – Tampa Bay.
Mix and match, stack it up – let’s start this weekend off with a bang!
Good luck tonight all! Let’s keep that hot streak rolling! Come join the Win Daily Sports Team – grab a Gold Membership and take advantage of all the tools, articles, and expert coaching we can give you to make you a consistent winner in DFS.
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!
