FanDuel MLB Daily Picks and Pivots – Friday September 8

Welcome to the Friday FanDuel MLB edition of Picks and Pivots, a fantasy baseball column focused on helping you find the best core lineup for today’s Main Slate DFS action!

For those of you finding us for the first time, the concept behind FanDuel MLB Picks and Pivots is to first identify key building blocks that can be used for any roster construction and then identify pivot points to help differentiate your lineup in hopes of a big payday!

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Thursday’s winning GPP scores were just above our season average as it took 280.2 FanDuel points to take down a tournament! Over the first 152 slates of the FanDuel MLB season, the average winning score to take down a GPP has been 260.8 points. Looking back at last season, the winning GPP lineup on average scored 255 FanDuel points with a typical roster build that allocated 25% of your salary cap to your SP and the remaining 75% to your hitters.

Over the first 152 slates of the FanDuel MLB season, the average winning score to take down a GPP has been 260.8 points.

Thursday’s Picks and Pivots was built around the concept that we would lock in Corey Kluber and not only fade Clayton Kershaw but also stack against him. It was a risky strategy but one I wanted to employ for GPP’s and I must say I felt pretty good as the Rockies dropped 9 runs on the Dodgers and Kluber delivered 64 FanDuel points on the back 13 K’s against the White Sox! The core of my build was around a Reds stack against Matt Harvey which felt like the safest part of my build and after they seemingly had Harvey on the ropes the first two innings, they only managed to muster 2 runs and that performance dropped me well below where I thought I would finish. Gotta love DFS variance –  right?

Each day we will break down our top Starting Pitcher and our top hitting stacks of the day while giving you our thoughts on roster build and lineup construction.

As always, we will look to update our picks and final lineup thought  prior to lock on our twitter account @FantasyCPR so make sure to give us a follow for all the late breaking lineup news.

Without further ado, let’s get into today’s slate!

FanDuel MLB – Top Starting Pitcher Pick:

Lucas Giolito ($7,700): If you want to pay up for Max Scherzer or Chris Archer in this spot, by all means those plays are never going to be “bad” but this slate feels to me like one where we can drop down at starting pitcher and take advantage of some soft mid-tier pricing and load up on bats!

Giolito comes into this contest in perhaps the greatest recent form as he has put together back to back starts of 7 innings surrendering only 1 ER with a 14:4 K:BB ratio while racking up 58 and 43 FanDuel points in those starts.

What has been most impressive from Giolito is that he has put up swinging strike rates of 10%, 10% and 16% in his last three outings, flashing the kind of upside that he showed in the minors with a 25% K rate over his last two seasons in AAA.

The recent form and game logs would normally draw ownership but I think with the opponent being a San Francisco Giants team with a season long 19% K rate will keep people away. If you dig a little deeper though you will start to see that the Giants are becoming a team recently that is striking out at a higher clip:

• Last 30 Days: 20.4%
• Last 14 Days: 21.5%
• Last 7 Days: 24.0%

One of the reasons we are starting to see this spike is that the Giants are giving more playing time to guys like Ryder Jones and Pablo Sandoval who have a 56.3% and 29.4% K rate respectively in the last week! The Giants line-up will be one I watch intently (and will update my thoughts on Twitter once I see it) as with the right line-up, there could be continued sneaky strikeout upside for Giolito in this spot!

FanDuel MLB – Top Hitting Stacks:

Two Core Bats that are WAY Too Cheap: The concept behind Picks and Pivots has always been a simple one – find a core building block and then work your way around it. Typically that core is a team stack or a pitching I refuse to budge off but today my eyes are on two bats that are in great spots that are flat-out too cheap.

Jake Lamb ($3,000) and Corey Seager ($2,800) are arguably two of the best players at their respective positions and the fact we can get them for a package deal at $2.9K of salary is a steal!

Lamb gets a home game in Chase Field against Jordan Lyles, a pitcher who has given up 2.45 HR/9 and 42.5% hard contact to left-handed batters this season! Lyles is a three pitch pitcher that features a fastball nearly 57% of the time with a curve ball/slider combination to round out his repertoire. Over the last two seasons, Lamb hits the curve ball and slider at a rate over the league average and if Lyles tries to challenge him with a fastball he could put one in the pool!

Arizona Diamondbacks Stack: Arizona as a team has the highest projected run total on the slate and any time they are in Chase Field they become one of the best stacks due to their concentrated top of the order thump. Lamb is the starting point but you can conceivably mix and match any of their top bats from 1-6 in the order!

Seager and the Dodgers: The Diamondbacks should be a popular stack due to their Vegas total but I expect the ice-cold Dodgers will be a team that is less popular considering their 4.5 projected run total but the return of Seager to this line-up could be the exact remedy for a recently punch-less line-up!

The Dodgers will take on German Marquez, a talented RHP who gives up a ton of hard contact even outside of Coors Field with a 41% rate to left-handed batters and 32% rate to right-handed batters on the road this season.

With Seager in every one of my line-ups, I am going to have a heavy pairing tonight of him with Cody Bellinger ($3,900) who has been relatively quiet from a DFS perspective recently but remember that this is a guy with a massive .358 ISO and .400 wOBA versus RHP this season! I rarely pay up for catcher but in this spot I may make an exception for Yasmani Grandal ($3,000) who has an impressive .231 ISO and .332 wOBA and profiles extremely well against a hard thrower like Marquez that uses his fastball nearly 65% of the time!

Mariners versus Ricky Nolasco: With a full slate of games I think we can take a three team stack approach tonight and if we are doing that I want to ensure I get exposure to the Mariners power against Nolasco and the Angels.

Nelson Cruz ($3,800) absolutely owns Nolasco, a reverse splits pitcher, and the BvP is frankly something we cannot ignore! In his career, Cruz is 11 for 25 with 4 home runs against Nolasco but let’s look at the numbers from this year only – 7 for 10, 2 doubles and 1 HR. If there is a one-off play that you must have tonight it is Nelson Cruz against Ricky Nolasco!

FanDuel MLB – Sample GPP Line-Up and Slate Overview

Please Note: This is NOT an optimized line-up, it is simply illustrative to show the type of roster build we can have using the logic previously laid out in Picks and Pivots. My actual line-up may differ from the line-up shown here.  

More from FanSided

• MLB Rumors: Justin Verlander has a clear suitor, but it comes with a catch
• MLB Rumors: Braves trade grade, Cardinals trade bait, Red Sox selling
• USMNT news: Turner to Forest, Trusty to Sheffield, Reynolds to Westerlo
• Inside the Clubhouse: What I’m hearing as the MLB Trade Deadline nears
• Yankees: Luis Severino has blunt assessment of another miserable outing

P: Lucas Giolito ($7,700)

C: Yasmani Grandal ($3,000)

1B: Cody Bellinger ($3,900)

2B: Robinson Cano ($3,500)

3B: Jake Lamb ($3,000)

SS: Corey Seager ($2,800)

OF: Nelson Cruz ($3,900)

OF: A.J. Pollock ($3,800)

OF: David Peralta ($3,400)

Slate Overview: As always with a loaded Friday Night slate in baseball it sets up perfectly for GPP play with so may different potential roster builds! Although we have some top-tier aces on the board, we have seen time and time again where paying up at pitcher can burn you and with both Scherzer and Archer coming off injuries that shortened their last starts, I think today is a day to drop down at SP and load up on some high upside bats!

Next: Picks and Pivots - NFL Edition Week 1

Best of luck in your FanDuel MLB contests and stay tuned to Fantasy CPR as we continue to break down MLB DFS, College Football and get you ready for week 1 in the NFL!