Gary Gustafson 
Welcome to the Monday, July 26th 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 – Pitching
Welcome into a Monday MLB DFS Picks and Pivots where we have 7 games to choose from, an all-clear day of weather, and just days before the MLB Trade Deadline which means a heightened awareness of roster moves that could impact our builds up to and even after lock.
Once again, the pitching options on this slate are weak and while it may seem like paying up for arms is a fool’s errand these days – if you look back at Sunday’s winning builds you saw “double aces” being a consistent winning strategy with Aaron Nola and either Trevor Williams or Yu Darvish.
On today’s slate, I would argue paying up for both arms is the best choice once again and it starts with Luis Garcia ($10.4K) against the Seattle Mariners.
Garcia is coming off his best two-game stretch, with 15 K’s in 11 innings, sporting a 37% K rate and a 19% swinging-strike rate. Over those two outings, Garcia has really altered his pitch mix, throwing his fastball just 38% of the time and ratcheting his cutter usage up to 32% which is a far cry from his season-long marks of 48% fastball usage and 19% cutter usage.
Garcia has thrown the cutter all year long to right-handed batters, but the last two games is throwing it over 45% to right-handed batters and even went to the pitch over 20% of the time last game against the lefties.
That cutter is one of the most dominant single pitches in baseball this season – and this is not me maxing poetic, the statistics are startling. Garcia has the highest swinging strike rate of any pitcher in baseball using the cutter, even higher than Corbin Burnes, and that pitch ranks among the top 5 in baseball in lowest opponent batting average alongside the deGrom slider and the Ohtani splitter.
When you start to see the difference in how the cutter reacts versus the fastball, you can understand why this has become such a dominant weapon for Garcia who will face a Mariners line-up with 4-5 right-handed batters in it, which plays to his K upside as RHB have a 31% K rate against him this season.
The other elite K arm on this slate is Shohei Ohtani ($9.2K) who after a slight hiccup in NY a few starts ago, was back to being dominant on the mound against Oakland where he struck out 8 batters on his way to 27 DK points.
Ohtani gets a starts against the Rockies in California and any time we get Colorado away from home, we have to look to attack them – especially considering they will likely have 4-5 RHB which gives Ohtani even more ceiling with his massive 38.6% K rate against right-handers.
Ohtani went to his slider nearly 21% of the time against Oakland, a massive spike in its usage – in fact, it was the 2nd highest mark for that pitch type this season for Ohtani and it baffled the Oakland bats and played exceptionally well off his fastball.
What is fascinating about the Ohtani pitching game logs is how different the pitch mix can be game to game and we saw that against Oakland where he went slider heavy, getting a 30%+ chase rate outside the zone, and conversely he used his splitter a season-low 8% of the time.
The fact Ohtani can use all these secondary pitches off his high 90’s fastball must be a horrendous guessing game for the opposing batters and with the Rockies outside of Coors, I think pairing Ohtani with Garcia gives you the best combination of K upside and ceiling for our MLB DFS picks.
UPDATE: Now normally, I tend to write my articles and provide updates in Discord but I wanted to make some updates mid-day today because ownership is well – wild. I love Shohei Ohtani as much as anyone but his ownership projections right now are pushing 70-80% which is a spot where you really have to question whether it is worth eating the chalk.
The issue is, the pivots um, well – don’t exist – at least not in any way you feel comfortable.
There is one arm I have interest in and frankly, I am surprised at his ownership and the fact that the opposite lineup looks to be the chalk stack and that is Matt Manning versus the Minnesota Twins.
Manning is coming off the best start in his young career, throwing 6 innings of 1 run ball with 4 K’s on his way to 19.9 DK points. Manning is a former first-round pick, a top 20 prospect in baseball, and a top 5 pitching prospect, and yet – he looks like someone the field is going to stack against as chalk.
Manning in the last two starts in which he has gone 11 innings with 7 K’s and just 3 runs allowed has made a significant change to his pitching approach – using a slider 20% of the time that he was not using at all through his first three outings at the big league level.
The guys at SB Nation did a really nice job of diving into this new approach for Manning and I highly recommend the read if you are interested. Manning is using the slider almost entirely against right-handed batters and it has generated a 50% whiff rate in each of the last two outings where he threw it 11 times in each game to RHB.
The Twins tonight are projected to have 5 right-handed bats in their lineup and every single one of them has a 40% or higher whiff rate against the slider from RHP so this could be a sneaky spot for Manning to build on his recent changes.
The fact Manning is sub 5% ownership and the Twins are projecting as chalk bats could be the ideal time to dig deeper and rock him as a punt SP2.
Main Slate Overview – Hitting
If we pivot to the bats, what stands out to me is a few stacks on DraftKings that offer us high/low salary points that make going double-aces an easy build type.
First up is the Chicago White Sox against LHP Mike Minor, who since last season has given up a .202 ISO, 43% fly-ball rate, and a 45% hard contact rate to right-handed batters.
The White Sox come loaded with right-handed power and will look to active Eloy Jimenez ($2.5K) who sits at a price point that is simply laughable and gives you the salary flexibility to go up and get the big bats like Tim Anderson and Jose Abreu.
Minor uses a low 90’s fastball and a slider over 60% of the time to right-handed bats and those two pitches are allowing a .235 ISO and 40%+ hard contact rate this season with Anderson, Abreu, Andrew Vaughn, and Adam Engel all sporting high ISO marks and HC rates against those pitch mix this season.
The White Sox have obvious high dollar bats in Abreu and Anderson over $5K but really – look at the rest of the line-up and all the value you can use with Vaughn/Eloy sitting in the mid $2K range and you have pure punts with Billy Hamilton and Danny Mendick to give you added salary flexibility.
The other stack that has similar high/low appeal is the late-night hammer of the Houston Astros against RHP Darren McCaughan, a low K, low-level prospect in the Mariners organization who relies on a sinkerball to get ground ball outs and does not miss bats.
Now, this kid went to Coors Field for his MLB debut and threw 5 hitless innings but man, this line is wonky – the kid had a 61% ground ball rate with a ZERO percent soft contact rate so you cannot even say he was getting weak contact off the bat. The 70% medium contact and the 1.6% swinging-strike rate is likely not a combination that will pay off long-term and the Astros set up nicely tonight as a way to attack the young arm.
McCaughan relies heavily on the sinker and there are some serious bats in this Houston lineup that do damage against it – none better than Yordan Alvarez ($5.4K) who has a massive .451 ISO, 58% hard contact rate, and an average distance traveled of over 325 feet. Alvarez may be my favorite bat on the entire slate and one that could be the late-night hammer with double-dong upside.
The other “big bat” that stands out is Kyle Tucker ($3.4K) as his batted ball profile sets up nicely against a ground ball arm. Tucker has a team-high 44% fly-ball rate against RHP and his 35% GB rate against sinkers is the lowest on the team – a key metric when looking at bats that can get the ball up in the air.
Just like the White Sox, we have value in this line-up with the 7-9 batters of Diaz, Straw and Maldonado all sitting at a near-minimum price and giving you the opportunity for a wrap-around stack with a road team and the guaranteed 9 innings of at-bats.
Aldemys Diaz ($2.1K) is a really intriguing swiss army knife on this slate, expected back off the IL tonight and giving you SS/OF eligibility on DK. Against the sinker, Diaz has a .217 ISO and 45% HC rate and with dual position eligibility – he becomes a core play for me tonight as I look to correlate Houston and Chicago together once we get lineups.
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap-Up
The key focus for me on this MLB DFS Picks and Pivots slate is getting the two high K ace level arms in Luis Garcia and Shohei Ohtani because frankly, every other arm seems overpriced and overly risky. However, as I outlined, with Ohtani standing out as massive chalk – I think there is a GPP path to moving off him and punting with our SP2 secret weapon!
All this revolves around a Astros/White Sox double stack that can be used with double aces or can be easily pivoted to all the biggest bats if you opt to drop down at SP2.
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.
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