Happy Monday! We start the week off with a nice 9-game MLB DFS Main Slate on Fanduel. Unlike the weekend slates full of stud pitching, tonight can get ugly quickly. On slates like these, I think it’s best to focus in on one or two pitchers and really narrow down your player pool. It’s a nice night to take a stand and it’s also a Coors Field night…
In regards to weather, it looks like a relatively quiet night outside of the White Sox @ Tigers game (I won’t roster a pitcher from that game due to rain delay concerns unless things change before lock). Let’s get to it on FanDuel tonight.
On FanDuel, I think it’s quite important to ensure you roster an arm that has short odds in Vegas to get the win and someone that is likely to go 6+ innings to get those Quality Start bonuses FanDuel applies. Here are the pitchers that fit that mold tonight:
All in all, I don’t think it’s necessary to pay up for Patrick Corbin tonight (especially in cash games). We all know we want to get some exposure to Coors Field tonight and it will be very difficult to do so if you roster Corbin. Having said that, I do like Corbin a lot for GPP’s for that very same reason.
Well, it’s a Coors Field night… so the offense is pretty easy. Stack the chalky Rockies and Diamondbacks. You know who the studs are that you want to play, but you can also find some value with guys like Elias Diaz ($2,500), Jake Lamb ($2,500), Stephen Vogt ($2,500), Matt Kemp ($3,300), Kole Calhoun ($3,300), and Garrett Hampson ($3,000).
If you’re looking for some other stacks, I’m a big fan of getting some exposure to both the Chicago White Sox (5.0 implied run total) and the Los Angeles Dodgers at home with a 5.05 implied run total. Both offenses should be rather low-owned tonight and offer a nice pivot off of Coors Field.
As lineups start to post for the night, I’ll update this article with some of my top value plays, but for the most part, I’m all about Coors Field tonight.
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MLB DFS season is finally here and so is the Aces and Bases from Win Daily Sports. The July 27th edition of Aces and Bases will take on the main 9-game MLB DFS slate on DraftKings and FanDuel. The purpose of this article is to identify our top pitching plays and fades on the slate, in addition to our top offense stacks for your GPP lineups.
Please make sure you keep an eye on the weather and other factors as those are always important things to monitor when playing MLB DFS. Be sure to check out our MLB DFS Projections as well. Without further ado, it’s Aces and Bases time.
Pablo Lopez takes the bump for the first time in 2020 and gets a favorable match up in the Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles bats played better than expected over the weekend in Boston, but the lineup is still lacking and shouldn’t be able to keep it up during the week.
Lopez leans on his change up, and for good reason, it has great movement and produced a 46% O-swing rate last year. Look for Pablo to find strikeouts in Monday’s match up. Covid-Postponed.
Honorable Mention: Josh James
Glasnow and his curveball were absolutely electric in 2019 (57% K rate!) as the young hurler was off to a fantastic start before getting injured.
Glasnow should be ready for almost a full workload Monday and looks to pick up where he left off in 2019 where started with a 1.78 ERA, 0.89 WHIP, and 76/14 K/BB ratio over 60 2/3 innings in 12 starts. Atlanta is a tough opponent but Glasnow was near match up proof before going down and he is just priced way too low at the moment.
Honorable Mention: Josh James($8,600 DK / $6,700 FD)
The counter play to our value ace, Wojciechowski gets to take the bump against the Marlins, which is the main reason for this play. It’s hard to justify rolling out a Orioles pitcher but Asher has decent command of his fastball and showed some flashes with a few good outings last year. The price sure reflects this one. Covid-Postponed.
Replacement: Wade Miley
Lester’s arsenal is rapidly declining, his signature cutter lost a lot of movement last year and his four seam fastball wasn’t effective is the slightest. The four seamer lost a couple ticks of velo that it didn’t have to give away, coming down to a career low 90.8mph. Im going to be fading Lester all year.
Honorable Mention: Jake Arrieta
On an 9-game slate, there are a ton of different ways to build your offense. Personally, I’m going to take a stand on a few offenses and call it a day. If you’re play MME style of GPPs, you can always get some exposure to more offenses, but for 3-Entry Max and Single Entry GPPs, I’m going to battle with a very limited player pool, as I really want to pick on a couple of starting pitchers and weaker bullpens.
We all know the importance of stacking when play MLB DFS GPPs, so here are my top stacks for the Sunday main slate.
Good luck to all this week!
Make sure you follow me on Twitter @TimmySigs and be sure to sign up for a ALL ACCESS GOLD ACCOUNT account here at Win Daily Sports. Gain access to our Projection Models and jump into our Discord where we will have our experts talking plays across every sport and slate as sports FINALLY return.
MLB DFS season is finally here and so is the Aces and Bases from Win Daily Sports. The July 25th edition of Aces and Bases will take on the main 11-game MLB DFS slate on DraftKings and FanDuel. The purpose of this article is to identify our top pitching plays and fades on the slate, in addition to our top offense stacks for your GPP lineups.
Please make sure you keep an eye on the weather and other factors as those are always important things to monitor when playing MLB DFS. Be sure to check out our MLB DFS Projections as well. Without further ado, it’s Aces and Bases time.
Alright, it’s risky, but he’s damn-near free. Burnes has always been a highly-touted prospect with ELITE swing-and-miss stuff. The problem is, he’s capable of walking the entire lineup and being pulled after two innings. Burnes posted a ridiculous 12.9 K/9 in his inconsistent 2019 season so you always need to keep an eye on him when he’s slated to start.
He’s been lights out thus far in the Brewers’ “Summer Training” and exhibition match-ups and should offer a ton of upside at a low price tag against a Cubs’ lineup that is projected for over a 21% K-rate.
Honorable Mention: Mike Minor
Clevinger, Castillo, and McCullers have juicy match ups for their opening performance of the 2020 season. Clevinger is facing off against a feeble Royals offense that shouldn’t put up much of a fight as a now healthy Clevinger should mow down batters on Saturday afternoon (just like Bieber did yesterday).
Staying in the AL central for opponents, Castillo has a uninspiring Tiger lineup that finished the 2019 campaign with a team .240 BA and a sad .294 OBP. Expect Castillo to feed the big cats a steady diet of changeups and produce strikeouts.
McCullers is simply priced way too low going up against a Seattle with an implied total of just 3.45 runs and a slate-high projected K-rate of over 24%. Keep this one simple and use McCullers.
Honorable Mention: Zach Wheeler ($10,100 DK / $9,000 FD)
Alex wood was sitting below 90mph with his fastball last year, and keeping it in the zone about 50% it was hit around quite a bit. Woods has a reported uptick in velo this year which wood (heh) make the fastball much more appealing. His changeup and curve were useful last year, with his curveball just being a few swinging strike points lower (48% in 2020 to 54% in 2017) than his All-Star 2017 season. This looks like some good value against a woeful SF lineup.
The Nationals are coming off the ultimate high of winning it all in 2019, and Strasburg is primed for another great season, but this Yankee lineup is one to fade all season. I am staying away from the high price and deadly lineup.
Honorable Mention: Lance McCullers
On an 11-game slate, there are a ton of different ways to build your offense. Personally, I’m going to take a stand on a few offenses and call it a day. If you’re play MME style of GPPs, you can always get some exposure to more offenses, but for 3-Entry Max and Single Entry GPPs, I’m going to battle with a very limited player pool, as I really want to pick on a couple of starting pitchers and weaker bullpens.
We all know the importance of stacking when play MLB DFS GPPs, so here are my top stacks for the Saturday main slate.
Good luck to all on this opening weekend!
Make sure you follow me on Twitter @TimmySigs and be sure to sign up for a ALL ACCESS GOLD ACCOUNT account here at Win Daily Sports. Gain access to our Projection Models and jump into our Discord where we will have our experts talking plays across every sport and slate as sports FINALLY return.
Interested in asking Nick some questions about this article? Hit him up on Twitter @StixPicks and join our FREE Discord Chat to join the conversation with Nick and our other pros!
In MLB DFS there is not a more important position than the pitcher spot. You will not make a bigger decision each day than selecting who your pitcher(s) is going to be. If you want to cash, you better get the pitcher position correct. You can afford to take a zero from a hitter due to variance, but if you get the pitcher position wrong, you are toast.
We don’t want that to happen to you, so let’s take a look at the process of selecting which pitcher to anchor your MLB DFS entries.
Like most other DFS sports, winning consistently at MLB is about being able to take advantage of matchups. DFS is about more than just playing the best players in the league. It is about exploiting the matchups that are presented on a daily basis. What separates the best DFS players from the rest is knowing which stats help exploit these matchups.
While amateurs will reference stats like ERA and batting average, these stats aren’t very helpful. Statistics, like ERA, are a snapshot of what has happened in the past but have little success predicting the future. Our team here will instead look to use stats that are predictive in nature.
MLB DFS is littered with variance. Mike Trout, the best player in baseball, can have an 0-for-4 night. So when we have a stat that is actually predictive we have to start our research there.
There is no more predictive stat in baseball than strikeouts. So we want to start our search for a MLB DFS pitcher by finding a hurler that can pile up the K’s. Especially considering that punch outs will score us a lot of points on the major DFS sites, like DraftKings, FanDuel, and Monkey Knife Fight.
Since strikeout rates are one of the more stable stats in MLB, this step to selecting a pitcher is pretty easy. You want to target a pitcher with a high strikeout rate facing an offense also with a high strikeout rate. A great resource to find these numbers is FanGraphs. Here we can find what a pitcher’s K% Rate is.
Clearly, the higher the number the better. But when looking for strikeouts we want to also take a look at the opponent as well as the starting pitcher. So again using FanGraphs, we can find the K Rate’s of offenses as well.
In an ideal situation, we would start a high K Rate pitcher against a high K Rate offense. But we can settle for an average K Rate pitcher against a high K Rate offense. The offense should give a boost to the pitcher assuming he can pitch deep into the game.
One note that is worth discussing in regards to strikeout rates is the time frame you want to reference those numbers from. From a statistical point of view a larger sample size generally allows for a more predictive probability. So in an ideal world we would use full season stats.
However we also must be cognoscente of the fact that things change. So we must keep an eye on things like K Rates on a smaller scale, whether that is month to month or even start to start. But when examining in the smaller sample, be sure that if you see a change in the K Rate that you don’t just assume that the pitcher all of a sudden is going to strikeout guys at a higher or lower rate than they are used to.
We must dive deeper in to the cause of the change. It might have been a coincidence. The pitcher may have just faced a lineup that sat some star players. But it also may be the fact that the pitcher is getting more horizontal movement on his slider, causing hitters to swing and miss at the pitch like never before. In a future piece we will take a look at how to find the causation on K Rate jumps in season, but for now we wanted you to be aware that is something to consider when looking at K Rate numbers for an entire season.
Speaking of pitching deep into the game, another stat that we have to consider on a given day is the pitcher’s ability to accumulate innings pitched. Or another way to look at it is the ability to pitch deep(er) into the game. This is important for a number of reasons.
But the idea is simple: The longer they can pitch, the more MLB DFS points they can score. The major DFS sites reward your pitcher for outs recorded. But also the longer they pitch the more likely they are to put up more strikeouts and even pick up the win bonus points.
How can we predict how many innings our pitcher will go to? Well, we can start by looking at their recent body of work. It may seem barbaric but we can do some box score scouting here. We may see helpful trends. For example, by going to MLB‘s website we can see the Chicago Cubs’ Kyle Hendricks did not pitch more than six innings in a game in the month of September.
While this is a starting point, we certainly need to dig deeper into predicting how long our starter will pitch. One way to do this is by taking a look at the opponents’ offensive pitches seen metrics. Using Baseball-Reference, we can find teams that have below league average pitches seen per plate appearance. This potentially will help us find a spot where a starting pitcher will pitch deeper into a game than usual.
2019 Pitches Per Plate Appearance By Team Courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com
Another great place to look for a potential opportunity to see a pitcher go longer in a game than normal is their own bullpen. If a team’s pen is over-taxed, the manager may lean on the starter a bit more than normal. A great site to find this information is Baseball Press.
Here we can see how many pitches a member of a bullpen has pitched over the last five days. If you see a lot of numbers across lots of the days across a lot of pitchers, the pen is taxed. Look for that team’s starter on that day, to go a bit longer in the game than normal.
At this point in your research for a pitcher for your MLB DFS entries, you should be able to whittle your list down. So now it is time to really dig in and do a deep dive into the pitchers on your shortlist. Specifically, you are going to take a look at their pitch arsenal and the success the opposition has had on those types of pitches.
To do this deeper dive into pitch arsenal, we will be using Brooks Baseball. Here we can take a look at a pitcher’s usage per pitch.
What you find is not only do we get the opportunity to see what pitches a pitcher tosses but also how often. As well as what that pitch does in terms of velocity and movements. This information then allows us to see what success the opposition’s lineup has against these pitches, velocity, and movements.
This information should help us better predict the success a particular pitcher will have against a lineup based on his pitching arsenal. This information, along with the strikeout and outing depth data, should give you a clear picture of which pitcher to build your DFS lineups around.
The last pieces of information you will want to incorporate into your decision making is from Sin City. The most important thing to consider when using Vegas to determine your DFS pitcher is of course how big of a favorite he is. Not only does this help with the much needed win bonus, but also plays a hand in the innings pitched category that we emphasized earlier.
In addition to the favorite number, you will also want to take a look at the team totals. It would make sense to want to target a team that is expected to score fewer runs. This, of course, is a good thing for your pitching target. The less runs a team is expected to score the more likely your pitcher is going to pile up the strikeouts and innings pitched. You can find this information over with our friends from DraftKings and FanDuel!
As you can see, you want to take your time and really research the pitching position. It is without a doubt the most important decision you will make while building your MLB DFS lineups. Be sure to target pitchers that are favorites with a favorable matchup in regards to strikeouts, innings pitched and arsenal.
Interested in asking Nick some questions about this article? Hit him up on Twitter @StixPicks and join our FREE Discord Chat to join the conversation with Nick and our other pros!
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