Gary Gustafson 
Welcome to the Tuesday, May 18th 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
Well hello, there my MLB DFS friends, and welcome into a monster 14 game slate here on Tuesday Night where we have some rain concerns at first glance in MIL/KC, PIT/STL, WAS/CHC and CWS/MIN.
We have a ton of arms on the hill but frankly not many we are clamoring to use and that likely means far more stacks we like than pitchers we feel like we need to have. Are you ready to dive in?
As a GPP player, I love slates like this where there are no “obvious” plays – we do not have a deGrom on the hill and there is no game in Coors Field. In fact, as of this writing, we have just one team with an IRT over 5 so this could be the kind of slate where ownership is wildly spread out or it could inflate a few players/spots as groupthink and optimizers drive MLB DFS lineup builds.
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Arms
As Adam laid out in Starting Rotation, I think this is the kind of day to live up top with your arms – more for safety/floor than “true ace ceiling” and the fact that our preferred stacks are on the cheaper side and allow us the ability to spend up on arms.
Rather than simply echo what our pitching GOAT Adam wrote up, I want to take a different spin on the top end of the range and how I think we can attack it.
First and foremost, I do not think any of the arms are “must haves” – not Woodruff, Wheeler, etc – so rather than build with pitchers first, work backwards in your builds today and build the stacks you want and see what arms fit into your build at the end.
Adam made strong cases for most of the guys at the top – but the one guy I wanted to dive into was Julio Urias ($9.6K) against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Urias is the 4th highest priced arm on this slate which when you consider some of his advanced metrics, makes him quite the steal. The Dodgers LHP ranks top 10 in baseball in CSW% (called + swinging strike rate) and CSTR% (called strike rate) and ranks top 25 in K% among all qualified arms.
Much of this is driven by a 77.7% first strike rate, by far the highest in baseball and a key driving force in Urias success as he is able to get ahead of hitters and then use his absolutely nasty curve ball as a put away pitch.
If you look at pitch type values, the curve from Urias sits among the top in all of baseball, sitting only behind Brandon Woodruff, Lance McCullers Jr., and Yu Darvish. Urias has anchored to this curve more and more, throwing it 25% last season, and now this year he is leaning on it nearly a third of the time.
Not only does Urias have demonstrated K upside, but he also has the ability to limit the damage as his 24.2% soft contact rate ranks second in all of baseball this season. Even better – Urias ranks among the top 5 in all of baseball with just a 3.6% walk rate. So a pitcher who attacks the strike zone does not walk batters and then either gets you to whiff or make weak contact.
All this sounds pretty darn good to me!
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Time to Stack
Now the fact that we do not have a ton of must-have arms on tonight’s slate means we will have our pick of big-time bats and my favorite tonight is the Tampa Bay Rays against Matt Harvey.
Harvey is coming off his worst outing against the Mets his last time to the mound where he gave up 7 runs in just 4 innings of work and his pitch to contact approach/lack of swing and miss stuff finally came back to bite him in 2021.
The Rays are the type of line-up that I think could make this a trend as they are able to get very lefty-heavy with Ji-Man Choi and Francisco Mejia back in the line-up and that could spell serious trouble in Camden Yards for a pitcher like Harvey who has been fly ball heavy to lefties this season.
The Rays lefties like Austin Meadows (.307 ISO), Brandon Lowe (.258 ISO) and Joey Wendle (.209 ISO) all have demonstrated power and Meadows to me is the one player that jumps off the page and anchors this stack.
Harvey is relying on his fastball/sinker to get ground ball outs, but where he has had trouble is against left-handed batters who can get the ball in the air to counter act that – enter Meadows who has a team leading 58% fly ball rate against RHP this season.
The way to beat the Rays is with strikeout arms that can take advantage of their high swing and miss rates – and the issue is, Harvey simply is not that guy. The top of this Rays line-up is just loaded with power – as you have Randy Arozarena at the top, followed by a parade of lefty power.
Now the last time we stacked the Rays was Thursday against Jameson Taillon and we had ourselves a little GPP takedown. Tonight, Taillon goes back to the mound in Texas against the Rangers and this is the mini-stack I want to load up around my Rays bats tonight!
We talked about this with the Rays that night, but Taillon right now is struggling mightily keep the ball on the ground and is especially struggling with left-handed power – to the tune of a 50% FB rate and .305 ISO mark.
So – a pitcher who is struggled with left-handed power and fly ball issues heads to Texas and faces Joey Gallo. I think you know how this ends.
Gallo is arguably one of my favorite plays on the slate as he is by far the most fly ball heavy bat in this Texas line-up, with a near 50% FB rate against RHP since 2019 and has a .300+ ISO mark against the fastball/curveball which are Taillon’s main weapons to LHB this season.
The other bat I love here is Nate Lowe who has been mashing RHP this season to the tune of a .256 ISO and matches up quite well against Taillon’s pitch types with a .522 ISO against his fastball velocity and has a 50% hard contact rate against the curveball.
If you look at the stacks I mentioned here in the Rays and Rangers – I think they get you DFS ceilings but in two different ways. The Rays are going to be by stringing hits and runs together – which means you want to go 4-5 deep with them to maximize your DFS output. The Rangers on the other hand is more home run hunting – so mini-stacking with Gallo/Lowe gets you the ceiling in what you hope pays off with just a few swings of the bat!
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap Up
The more I dig into this MLB DFS slate on Tuesday the more I really like it for GPP’s as we have so many tournament routes and comfortable pivots off chalk if it ends up materializing.
While pitching may not be the best, I would argue the player pool is incredibly condensed and it is largely top heavy. I am not getting cute tonight and picking on cheap arms to get bats – especially not when I can pay up and still get elite stacks like Tampa and Texas that give me upside and salary relief.
On a slate like this, I want to anchor to top tier strikeout arms and build around power stacks like Tampa and Texas that can take advantage of the opposing arm’s weakness for what should be big time DFS outputs!
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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