Gary Gustafson 
Welcome to the Monday, June 14th 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!
Before we dive into this Monday Slate – a huge THANK YOU to our NASCAR DFS lead here at Win Daily, Matt Vecchio, for continuing to bring absolutely amazing content and advice and help NASCAR novices like me win big!
Main Slate Breakdown
Welcome into this Monday MLB DFS Picks and Pivots slate where we have some rain concerns across this 13 game slate with some serious offensive firepower and a relatively murky pitching pool to wade through!
Despite the fact we have 26 pitchers to choose from, this feels like a really condensed player pool for arms and as such, I think you need to have a really tight focus on getting your arms right on this slate because my feeling is that more arms will hurt you than help you on this slate.
Tyler Glasnow ($10.7K) is the obvious top dog on this slate with an elite 36% K rate and 17% SS rate and on a one pitcher site like FanDuel, consider yourself lucky you can basically stop there.
On DraftKings, we need an SP2 and honestly this is where much of your night’s success will be determined as I think the most likely ownership is that people go high low with Glasnow and a cheap SP2 to fit in better bats.
I think there is a strong argument however to pay up for our SP2 with a floor/ceiling combination for LHP Sean Manaea ($10.1K) against the Angels in Oakland. Now, there is massive sticker shock here with Manaea, as he has seen his price spike from the mid $8K range last start to being nearly on par with Glasnow salary wise.
The reality is, Manaea’s performance this year has warranted the price hike, especially at home where the lefty has historically seen better results and 2021 is no different. Manaea in Oakland sees his K rate increase 2-3% while the hard contact rate drops and the GB rate increases.
The match-up tonight against the Angels is an exploitable one especially without Mike Trout available and it is one that Manaea has already navigated with success twice since Trout was sidelined in mid-May with an injury.
Manaea has faced the Angels twice, once on the road where he threw 5 innings of 1 run ball and struck out 6 on his way to 17 DK points and once in Oakland where he went 6.2 IP with just 1 ER allowed and K’s with 24 DK points.
In both cases, the swing and miss stuff was there and we have seen other LHP have similar success recently against the Angels where Yusei Kikuchi struck out 8 and Justus Sheffield struck out 7 batters.
Now putting up 20-25 DK points at over $10K of salary is frankly an over pay and I get that but honestly that perceived floor for Manaea may be worth the investment on a night where there are more potential landmines behind Glasnow than arms we want to play.
The other aspect of a Glasnow/Manaea pairing that is appealing is that the salary constraints when it comes to building your bats, really are not there as you have $3.7K per batter for the rest of your line-up and there are some stacks on this slate that seem significantly under-priced.
The first one that stood out to me today was the Cincinnati Reds against LHP Eric Lauer who is getting the start for Milwaukee as they move to a 6 man rotation in the middle of 16 straight games with no off days.
Lauer has extreme splits and splits that do not work in his favor today against a right-handed heavy Reds teams as he has surrendered a massive .300 ISO mark and 52% HC rate against right-handed batters this season.
This Reds line-up is constructed perfectly to attack these splits as they will have only two LHB in the line-up with Joey Votto and Jesse Winker, so loading up the righties here is the most direct path in this MLB DFS stack.
Lauer’s pitch mix no matter how you slice it has been hit hard by RHB this season as his fastball (.206 ISO), cutter (.520 ISO) and changeup (.400 ISO) have all operated as batting practice offerings in 2021.
Nick Castellanos and Eugenio Suarez are the primary options here that both have massive power metrics against LHP and both have similarly high marks against the cutter/fastball combination that Lauer depends on.
Tyler Stephenson ($3.9K) may have limited sample numbers here with just 40 plat appearances against LHP but his .351 ISO and 55% HC rates ranks behind only Casty this season for the Reds right-handed batters.
The bottom of the order gives you a nice wrap-around stack with Scott Heineman and Kyle Farmer who have .400 and .200 ISO marks respectively with 45-50% HC rates and with the Reds being the visiting team we get guaranteed 9th inning at-bats for this bottom of the order.
You didn’t think I would end Picks and Pivots without the public recognition of today’s holiday – yes, it is in fact Lester Day and we get a dirt-cheap Pirates stack against LHP Jon Lester to help us pay for the big arms on Monday.
The Pirates are never a team we wake up and get excited to stack but the top 4 in this order specifically, offer some serious pop against LHP with every single one having .225+ ISO marks against southpaws this season including Adam Frazier, Ke’Bryan Hayes, Brian Reynolds and Jacob Stallings.
We have documented this multiple times but the cutter to RHB has been Lester’s undoing with a .576 ISO mark against him and that was the exact pitch that Manuel Margot took him deep on in the first inning of the Rays game his last time out.
The pitch data is limited for the Pirates hitters, but Stallings does stand out with a 60% HC rate against that pitch type and a massive 350 foot average distance traveled against the cutter.
The one issue with the Pirates/Reds correlation is that we have two catchers we want to use in Stallings/Stephenson but with Stephenson have 1B eligibility on DK – you can actually slide him there to use a dual catcher line-up which will make your stack incredibly unique. Now if only Eugenio Suarez still had SS eligibility to we could put him and Hayes in the same build!
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap-Up
Stepping back and looking at this Monday Night MLB DFS Picks and Pivots slate, we will need to be mindful of some wet weather in the northeast and I think most importantly, we need to see how ownership plays out.
On DraftKings, the SP2 decision and the fact we have all these big dollar offenses, including a game in Coors Field, may lead to chalky punt SP2 builds and I think that could be where we get different – paying up for our second arm alongside Glasnow while taking advantage of cheap stack with the Reds/Pirates.
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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