Gary Gustafson 
Welcome to the Wednesday, May 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 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: Early Slate Breakdown
What day is it? What day is it? That is right my MLB DFS friends it is hump day and that means split slate baseball for us with a 4 game early slate to attack starting at 1PM EST.
This four gamer actually has some solid starting arms with high swing and miss stuff while also offering us some high powered offenses we can stack so I think this is a worthy day slate to take some shots in GPP’s.
Carlos Rodon ($10K) is the headliner on this slate from a SP1 perspective and it is hard not to make him a priority with a 37% K rate and 17% SS rate which are far and away the best marks on this slate. While the Cardinals do have some pop, the bottom of this order is something we can attack due to injury and even the Cards best hitters (Arenado/Goldy) struggle mightily against Rodon’s primary put pitch, the slider, as they have a combined sub .100 ISO with a 30%+ whiff rate.
James Kaprielian ($7.7K) looks like the ideal SP2 pairing with Rodon as we can get similar K upside with the A’s young righty who has sported a 33% K rate and 12% SS rate over his first two starts in the bigs with some serious swing and miss stuff using his change-up against LHB and his slider against RHB.
Kaprielian has been able to notch back-to-back 20+ DK point outings against the Red Sox and Angels and gets arguably his “best” on paper match-up against the Mariners today. Right-handed arms against Seattle have feasted all season and particularly in the recent games highlighted by Spencer Turnbull’s no-hitter while all of Casey Mize, Chris Paddack, Yu Darvish, and most recently, Frankie Montas has notched strong K outputs with all of them going for 20+ DK points.
If you are looking for a pivot or the opportunity to go “mid-range” at SP – I think you can consider Griffin Canning ($7.2K) as well against the K-heavy Texas Rangers.
Canning has largely been a “serviceable” arm this season with mid-range DFS output besides a meeting with the aforementioned Mariners, but the underlying metrics of a 25% K rate and 15% SS rate this season tell you there is upside to be had. The match-up against Texas is one we can and should exploit as well – as they rank top 5 in K rate allowed (26.3%) this season to right-handed pitchers.
From a bats perspective, it looks like we have a few spots we can attack but the most glaring is the Minnesota Twins against Jorge Lopez. Since the start of last season, Lopez is giving up a 43% hard contact rate and has really struggled with left-handed power to the tune of a .231 ISO allowed.
Lopez relies nearly 40% of the time on his sinker to both sides of the plate and this is a pitch type the Twins profile well against with 5 hitters in the projected line-up sporting .200+ ISO marks against it while every single hitter besides Andrelton Simmons has a 40% or higher hard contact rate against it!
Max Kepler ($4.3K) is the absolute priority play for me in this game as he profiles as the best hitter against all three of Lopez’s primary pitch types but this entire line-up from the left side is in play and both Miguel Sano/Josh Donaldson are right-handed batters that hit the sinker well and Sano in particular has a near 60% fly ball rate which is key against right-handers who rely on ground balls.
The other “big offense” on this slate is the Chicago White Sox against RHP Jon Gant and while we typically like the Sox against lefties, I think this is a spot where we need to attack a pitcher that is screaming regression!
Gant’s 2.14 ERA since the starts of last season may may it seem like he is an arm we should avoid but the underlying metrics tell a different story with a 5+ SIERA since 2020 and this season, his 5.4 xFIP and a 15% BB rate that nearly matches his 18% K rate – tell me that regression is coming soon.
The way I would attack the White Sox is a full-on stack or fade – no in between – and I say that because only Yasmani Grandal and Jose Abreu have .200+ ISO marks against RHP since the start of last year. So I think if you are playing the Gant regression route, you are banking on the lack of control, BABIP coming back in the hitter’s favor and big crooked numbers by stringing together walks and base hits as Gant has been able to avoid the long ball in his career with just a .74 HR/9 rate in over 300 innings of work.
If you are looking for a lower-owned mini-stack – the one team that intrigues me is the Baltimore Orioles against RHP Michael Pineda. Lefties have hit Pineda well this year with a .233 ISO and over 50% fly ball rate and the LHB in this O’s offense profile well against Pineda’s pitch types.
Pineda relies nearly 50% of the time on his slider/change combo to lefties and all of Cedric Mullins, Freddy Galvis, Anthony Santander and DJ Stewart have .200+ ISO marks against the slider while Mullins, Santander and Stewart all have similar power profiles against the change-up.
For me – there are two paths I think you can take today on this early slate – going Rodon/Kaprelian with a Twins/Orioles game stack or going mid-range arms with Kaprelian/Canning with a White Sox/Twins power stack. Having multiple paths is key on day slates like this because we often see unusual line-ups that make our early builds worthless if big bats get the day off!
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Main Slate
Opening up the 9 game MLB DFS Main Slate we are met with two obvious stud arms up top with Tyler Glasnow and Trevor Bauer – both priced over $10K on DK and for good reason. It is not often we get a slate with two of the best K arms in baseball, as both of these pitchers sport 36%+ K rates this season and honestly, you can make the argument to simply stop here and just take the easy path with arms.
I say this because the pricing on bats is just flat out mis-priced and you can easily stack powerful offenses around these two top tier arms without sacrificing at all.
Going Glasnow/Bauer leaves you $3.6K per batter and once you start looking at the hitting pricing, you will realize quickly how easy this is to do and that is in large part due to the continued pricing discounts we get for the Yankee and Rays bats.
Let’s start from the bottom – if you use Taylor Walls ($2.2K) and Brett Gardner ($2.3K) in these stacks all of a sudden, you have $4K+ per batter and that means you can go high/low with the priority bats like Randy Arozarena and Aaron Judge who are both well over $5K tonight.
Now, the Yankees bats in particular let us down last night and as Adam outlined in Starting Rotation, the Jays are rolling out a talented RHP in his debut tonight with Alex Manoah – so this is a spot where they could struggle against a talented swing and miss arm or they could take advantage of an arm with first start jitters in Yankee Stadium.
While we may not know much about how Manoah will translate – what we do know is that the Yankees have power – tons of it – in fact the projected lin-eup tonight has a .200+ ISO team mark with a 42% HC rate against RHP since 2020 and that is without some of their biggest bats!
The Yankee bats are just simply too cheap as a stack – as you have 6 of the 9 batters at $4K or lower and I would expect that after their dud last night and the “shine” of a new prospect people want to play on the other side of this game, we have a shot to get a Yankee stack under-owned here tonight.
The Rays against Mike Minor are a simple stack in that we want the right-handed bats first and foremost to attack a pitcher who has given up a .200+ ISO mark and 47% HC rate against RHB since 2020.
Arozarena is the big spend and his .296 ISO mark against LHP since last season jumps off the page as an elite play but do not overlook the other right-handed batters here. Mike Brosseau ($2.8K) has a .264 ISO mark while Mike Zunino ($3.7K) leads the team with a massive .370 ISO mark against southpaws the last season +.
If you look at pitch type data, Minor uses his slider mostly against RHB and all three batters noted above have .300+ ISO marks against it. If he goes to the change, well Brosseau and Zunino have .250 and .400 marks against that pitch while Brosseau even has a .400+ ISO against the curve which Minor will use 20% of the time.
You get the gist – there is power here and it is wildly underpriced.
I am not getting cute on the Main Slate tonight – double aces in Glasnow and Bauer and give me all the under-priced power in New York and Tampa. See you at the top.
MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – The Wrap-Up
I love these split slate Wednesdays for MLB DFS and I think the two slates play quite differently today. The early slate feels like we have more options we can pivot off of if we want while the main slate feels incredibly straight forward.
The key on both slates today though is locking in the high K arms as a priority and understanding we can do so while still capturing high power stacks that are priced in a way we do not have to make sacrifices at pitching.
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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