FanDuel MLB Daily Picks and Pivots – Monday September 11
Welcome to the Monday 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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Sunday’s winning GPP scores were well below our season average as it took 236.5 FanDuel points to take down a tournament! Over the first 155 slates of the FanDuel MLB season, the average winning score to take down a GPP has been 260.3 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 155 slates of the FanDuel MLB season, the average winning score to take down a GPP has been 260.3 points.
Sunday’s winning GPP line-ups were built around Stephen Strasburg who even at 35% ownership in GPP’s was the key to winning with a 10 strikeout 64 FanDuel point performance. Offensively, the Kansas City Royals were the top stack of the day with 11 runs scored and a big time day from Brandon Moss who put up 38.4 FanDuel points to key the offensive attack!
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:
Before we get into today’s MLB slate, as today is September 11th I hope that each of you will take a moment to remember the lives lost that day and keep the families and friends of those we lost in your thoughts on a painful anniversary. For any first responders reading this – thank you for what you did that day and what you continue to do each day for us as we are reminded of your heroism on the anniversary of 9/11 and what we have seen and will continue to see through the horrendous damage inflicted by the recent hurricanes. Hopefully you all can take some time to reflect today to remember and realize how lucky we are to get the “release” that DFS can sometimes afford us!
Carlos Carrasco ($10,600)/ Zack Greinke ($9,300): With a short slate on the Monday after opening week in the NFL we could see some careless scores as “football money” floods into those looking to try their hand at baseball tonight which always adds an interesting dynamic! There are a couple of core thoughts I have for this slate after looking it over and one of them is to allocate the salary to pay up for your starting pitcher!
Carrasco and Greinke have the top two strikeout rates on the slate at over 27% each and finish 1-2 in terms of swinging strike rate with 13.2% and 12.6% respectively and step to the mound as massive home favorites with Carrasco over -300 and Greinke at -200.
Ultimately there are two big deciding factors that lead me to lean towards Greinke over Carrasco – first is the price, the $1,300 discount is material enough where grabbing Greinke for a 12% discount off Carrasco has the ability to significantly improve my line-up.
The second is that Greinke, even in Chase Field, has shown the higher strikeout upside when pitching at home! Greinke this season has massive strikeout splits – sporting a 30.6% K rate at home versus 23.4% on the road compared to Carrasco who actually sees his K rate drop from 29.1% on the road to 26.6% at home.
Carrasco is intimately familiar with this Tigers team, having faced them three times since July 1st and putting up FanDuel point totals of 46, 58, 49 with strikeout totals of 8, 11 and 7 which shows you the upside he has in this spot! Greinke meanwhile has taken on Colorado twice at home this season and put up 49 and 40 FanDuel points with strikeout totals of 9 and 8 in those outings.
On this slate you have the two highest strikeout arms going into situations where they have excelled so I simply see no reason to pivot off them especially considering the price points are reasonable enough where you can afford them AND high-end bats.
My strategy tonight is to get exposure to both arms but if you are playing single entry, I would prefer the material salary savings of Greinke which allow you to build a better core of bats!
FanDuel MLB – Top Hitting Stacks:
Arizona Diamondbacks RHB versus a LHP in Chase Field: I mentioned that my slate strategy would be to pay up for pitcher and I can tell you that key concept goes hand in hand with locking in the elite right-handed bats in Arizona tonight!
Kyle Freeland is a very talented young arm and the fact he has induced a 60% ground ball rate to RHB gives him the ability to limit the damage against a right-handed heavy line-up but the reality is that Arizona possesses the kind of elite hitting that makes them a top stack regardless of what type of lefty is on the hill!
Allow me to indulge you for a moment with the numbers versus lefties over the last month for the top two bats in the Arizona line-up:
- Paul Goldschmidt ($4,200): .471 ISO and .512 wOBA with a 40% FB rate
- J.D. Martinez ($4,200): .500 ISO and .506 wOBA with a 47.1% FB rate
Those numbers are just off the charts and with the elevated fly ball rates it gives me confidence they should be able to off-set the ground ball tendencies of Freeland on the opposing mound! I am simply locking these two batters into every line-up I make tonight and you can add in Chris Iannetta ($2,500) if he is catching and batting 2nd tonight as part of a Arizona three-man stack!
Milwaukee Brewers RHB versus LHP Steven Brault: The Brewers are a team we can usually target with pitchers due to their high strikeout rate but when they are facing a LHP with a K rate less than 10% the story completely flips in favor of the bats! Brault in limited sample size has a 5.7 SIERA to match his ERA and has a walk rate to match his K rate which means we should see plenty of free passes and plenty of balls in play!
The Brewers are priced reasonably which makes them an ideal secondary stack to pair with our top flight SP and our Arizona sluggers as we can grab bats like Ryan Braun ($3,200) and Domingo Santana ($3,000) to take advantage of the platoon splits of the Pittsburgh left-hander in Miller Park!
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
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- Inside the Clubhouse: What I’m hearing as the MLB Trade Deadline nears
- Yankees: Luis Severino has blunt assessment of another miserable outing
P: Zack Greinke ($9,600)
C: Wilson Ramos ($2,100)
1B: Paul Goldschmidt ($4,200)
2B: Neil Walker ($3,000)
3B: Evan Longoria ($3,300)
SS: Corey Seager ($2,700)
OF: J.D. Martinez ($4,200)
OF: Ryan Braun ($3,200)
OF: Domingo Santana ($3,000)
Slate Overview: The core of this slate to me boils down to locking in either Carrasco or Greinke, then building around a core of Goldy, J.D., Braun and Santana and filling in my roster from there. In the sample build I noted above we can continue to take advantage of elite players at reasonable mid-tier prices and can utilize Evan Longoria in Citi Field against C.C. Sabathia or Corey Seager against Chris Stratton in San Francisco!
Best of luck in your FanDuel MLB contests and stay tuned to Fantasy CPR for all your DFS needs as we continue to break down the daily MLB action, weekly EPL slates and of course Week 2 in the NFL!