Gary Gustafson 
Welcome to the Tuesday 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 to an MLB DFS Picks and Pivots Tuesday where we are back on the grind after a big NFL Sunday! First and foremost, a huge congrats to Jon and Big T – two of the Win Daily Sports family that hit BIG on Sunday – what a way to kick off the NFL season!
When stepping back and looking at this 12 game MLB DFS slate on Tuesday, what stands out is the plethora of top-end pitching with elite strikeout ability and the presence of a New York Yankee lineup with a 6+ IRT against the Baltimore Orioles in Camden Yards that will likely draw the lion’s share of offensive ownership.
So let’s just explore that for a second because we need to take slate context, the player pool at large, and the pricing into account before you simply list off “best plays.”
Finding the Chalk
The single most glaring aspect of this slate is how cheap the Yankees bats are against LHP Alex Wells, who has given up a .246 ISO mark and 49.2% hard contact rate to right-handed batters this season. Sure the big bats like Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton are $5K and up but the rest of the Yankee lineup is affordable – with Luke Voit ($3.8K), Gleyber Torres ($3.7K) and Gio Urshela ($3.5K) all offering solid mid-range value.
I bring this up because the bats for New York will be popular and are also not all that cost-prohibitive which will allow MLB DFS players to not only grab the stack but use Gerrit Cole ($10.7K) as the clear cut SP1. From a metrics perspective, Cole is everything we want to anchor to – the clear top-dog in elite recent form with a 36% K rate the last month which ranks 4th in all of baseball. Like we argued yesterday with Sandy Alcantara, when you get an elite K arm in top recent form, those become the guys you anchor to on DK as SP1’s every single time out.
The fact you can get Cole and a Yankees stack so easily are what jumps out to me at first glance and I struggle to see a path today where this is not the stone chalk concept – for good reason. I will ALWAYS argue to play the top-tier K arms – on every slate, every single time. Pitching, and pitching with strikeouts, is what will give you ceiling performances and so Cole to me is the chalk to eat and simply move on and while I want to tell you that the Yankees bats are something we can fade – DraftKings made the pricing such where it gets difficult to even make the argument. I will always say, however – MLB DFS hitting is the most variable aspect of the game so if the Yankees bats are chalk and you want to find pivots – on a 12 gamer – we have options.
Finding the Pivots
The SP2 pairing and secondary stack become critical pivot points for us now in GPP build’s where we opt to get some Bronx chalk. If we see ownership later today and the chalk SP2 or secondary stack is where you are landing – that is where you move off – again, if you go Cole/Yankees as chalk, this is how you find ways to be different.
There are two SP2’s and two stacks that stand out to me as great correlated plays with our core concept and I think we can get builds that work well with a mixture of both.
First, let’s talk pitching – and how dominant Nathan Eovaldi ($9.6K) was the last time out against the Rays. The single most glaring thing about that start was how Eovalidy totally changed his pitch type – going to his curveball over 30% of the time which was by far the most he had used it in any start this season and it accounted for 50% of his strikeouts in that outing. That change in pitch type and strategy and the success he had with it – makes him an intriguing case but I also do wonder, with how chalky E-Rod was last night, is this a spot where game log watchers go to him as a default SP2 despite the price increase?
My favorite SP2 though is someone we talked about last time he took the mound and I am going right back to it after his price went down. What if I told you there was an arm on this slate with a 26% K rate the last month, who has a 14.5% SS rate and has struck out 6 and 7 batters in each of his last two starts where he went 6 innings and 100 pitches.
Welcome to Jackson Kowar ($5K) night my friends.
If you went this route with us last time you saw the good and bad with Kowar, an electric K arm but a youngster still finding his way. The Royals right-hander have up 6 ER on 2 HR’s but managed 11 DK points due to the 7 punchouts. We talk about this all the time – K’s are king in MLB DFS and they can get you DFS output even when the pitcher gives up runs.
What is interesting about this match-up tonight is that the Oakland A’s are right-handed heavy, with 6 of the 9 batters projected to hit from the side of the plate that Kowar has a 28% K rate against. The change-up is the key for Kowar with 5 punchouts on that pitch type in both of his most recent outings and his ability to use it as a putaway pitch to RHB is what makes this a tantalizing ceiling spot at minimum price.
One of the benefits of going Cole/Kowar tonight is that you can really pay up for a secondary stack and two teams – the Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox – have a correlation that fits perfectly with where we want to build around the Yankees core stack.
With Jordan Lyles and Tyler Anderson opposing these lineups, we get a chance to attack high ISO and HC arms with visiting teams and guaranteed 9th inning at-bats that fit around where the Yankees bats may be weaker.
Against Lyles, the reality is we have multiple paths to attack as he has a 1.8 HR/9 rate against LHB and a 2.25 HR.9 rate to RHB with 45%-50% HC rates to both sides so do not be afraid to stack this up on either side. The Astros once again could be a great high/low lineup with elite top-end bats like Yordan Alvarez but also $2K punts like Siri/McCormack in the OF.
Anderson on the other hand is far more traditional in terms of his splits with the right-handed batters sporting the higher power metrics with a .207 ISO mark and near 2 HR/9 rate. The change-up has really been the pitch to righties that have been walloped with a .467 ISO mark from RHB the last month – and both JD Martinez and Hunter Renfroe have .250-.300 ISO marks against that pitch type from southpaws.
We talked about this a lot yesterday – but secondary stacks are always more about position correlation and how they fit around your core stacks more than anything else. So if you are going Yankees at the core of your build – do not sacrifice for a secondary stack – simply find the one that fits best around it.
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap-Up
This is a strong MLB DFS Picks and Pivots Tuesday slate and one where I think we will see highly concentrated ownership which is always fascinating for a 12 game slate where we have so many viable pivot options.
I do think that ownership will become an incredibly important part of our decision-making tonight and where and how we choose to follow the chalk and where we find pivot paths off it. On a slate of this size, we won’t have trouble finding ways off it but we need to be smart and strategic in how we do it!
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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