Welcome to the Wednesday 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

Welcome to a 10 game MLB DFS slate here on Wednesday which sadly, starts after Jacob deGrom takes the mound for the Mets, depriving us of a deGOAT day here in Picks and Pivots. The good news though is the temperatures across nearly every single ballpark are spiking and with that likely means some big time offensive production to follow!

When looking to build my MLB DFS lineups tonight, I think as far as pitching is concerned – there are really four arms that stand out – Tyler Glasnow, Carlos Rodon, Alex Wood, and German Marquez.

Since the start of 2020, these four starters are the top four arms on the slate in terms of swinging strike % – all sitting in the 12-14% range – and it seems like Vegas has the pitchers in a similar tier with their opposition all sitting in the bottom 5 of projected runs scored tonight.

Pricing on our batters is likely to determine how you prioritize these arms – whether you go high/low with one of Glasnow/Rodon and a pitcher in San Fran or you can opt for the pitcher’s duel route and take Wood versus Marquez in arguably the best pitching environment on the slate.

One note on Wood and Marquez – it looks like CB Bucknor will be calling the balls/strikes tonight and for those of you unfamiliar – there is almost no umpire outside of Bill Miller who is more of a pitcher’s umpire – in fact, Bucknor on average calls 17% more strikes than the average umpire which is second-most among active umpires.

There is one other arm I want to mention for GPP’s and one that Adam did not in his Pitching Breakdown, so I wanted to plead my case – and that is Vince Velasquez ($6.5K) against St. Louis.

The risk is real with Vinny, let’s not overlook that – but this is a pitcher with elite K ability as he has a 31% K rate and 12% SS rate since the starts of 2020. That K rate on this slate would rank behind only Tyler Glasnow and there are some pitch mix changes in VV that are worth our attention.

When tracking his pitch types, I noticed serious trend changes from 2019 to 2021 and there is a great article on FanGraphs which outlined this starting last year with a visual that I thought would be helpful above. The biggest change with VV is that he has all but abandoned his slider since 2019 which is good because it ranked as his worst pitch and was getting ranked on average as a pitch type that was actually providing NEGATIVE 10 runs of value.

Instead VV has moved to a fastball/change/splitter approach and it was one he stuck with in his first start in Colorado where he had a 13% SS rate and nearly 30% CSW%.

That change-up is really what has my attention, especially against a right-handed heavy Cardinals team and no single player profiles well against it. No batter on St. Louis has a .200 ISO against that pitch type and the contact rate is 70% or below with elevated whiff rates.

In GPP’s – K’s are king and Velasquez has the pedigree to pay off, as long as you understand the floor is very much in negative town!

Building Our Bats

The bats are really your decision point tonight and my goodness, we have a ton to choose from. With so many mediocre to below-average arms in the player pool, it is no surprise the offense seems plentiful and you better hit right on your big bats with bad arms on the mound and warm temperatures in seemingly every ballpark.

There are two spots that jumped off the page for me tonight with power bats in pristine hitting conditions as we get the Blue Jays against Erick Fedde and the Padres with the roof open in Chase Field against Taylor Widener.

My guess is – the Jays become a popular stack tonight after their onslaught last night of Max Scherzer but as long as the Yankees continue to be on the slate, my hope is they continue to be chalk and give us paths to easy pivot stacks.

Erick Fedde in his career has always been a reverse splits arm that has struggled more with RHB and since the start of last season, the trend has been clear with a .220+ ISO mark and over 2 HR/9 allowed to opposing right-handed batters.

The park in Dunedin is playing as a massive hitter’s park and the beat reporters for both teams last night were mentioning how the ball was just jumping off bats and getting extra carry. This feels like another spot where the Jays go nuts, and while it would be awesome to get George Springer back in the line-up – there are enough spots to attack here even without him.

Fedde relies primarily on his sinker – a pitch that all of Cavan Biggio, Rowdy Tellez, Randal Grichuk, Marcus Semien and Lourdes Gurriel hammer with .200+ ISO marks and 300+ feet average distance traveled.

Don’t worry though – if he moves to his curve – Bichette and Vladdy Jr. join the party with .300+ ISO marks and – 350+ feet average distance traveled. Just imagine – we are days away (and maybe it happens tonight) from George Springer re-joining this line-up and holy Moses, they are going to be a death wish for opposing pitchers.

The general gist – the Blue Jays lineup is good. Erick Fedde is not. There will be home runs hit – we should play the guys who can hit baseballs far.

The other spot on this slate I love is the San Diego Padres against Taylor Widener. Widener is a talented arm with live K stuff, but when you have a fly-ball pitcher giving up 45%+ hard contact to both sides of the plate against this kind of line-up with the roof open in Arizona, yikes.

Widener’s biggest struggles have come from the left side with a 2.5 HR/9 rate and .288 ISO but let’s not pretend like the 1.7 HR/9 and 47% HC rate on the right side are not begging for problems as well.

This Padres line-up is just loaded with power- literally, every single batter 1-6 in the line-up has a .200+ ISO mark against RHP since 2020 and all of Tatis, Machado, Hosmer, Myers and Cronenworth have 45%+ HC rates.

This is a spot, much like the Blue Jays where the power bats are what you are going to covet and these two teams (Toronto and SD) actually correlate really well on DraftKings when you start to stack them together.

MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap Up

We have a strong MLB DFS slate here on Wednesday with a small player pool of elite K arms which will make the pitching decisions far more condensed and allow us to attack the big bats with warm temperatures across the league tonight. Building around big stacks like the Blue Jays/Padres alongside those K arms is a path to GPP upside tonight as we go strike out heavy and home run huntin’!

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