MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Friday May 11
Welcome to the Friday edition of MLB DFS Picks and Pivots, a fantasy baseball column focused on helping you find the best core lineup for this slate of DFS action!
For those of you finding us for the first time, the concept behind MLB DFS Picks and Pivots is to give you a first look at the day’s MLB DFS slate, including our top picks, plays and pivots, using FantasyDraft pricing as a reference, to help you build your best line-up and win big
Picks and Pivots is not a simple “best plays” column but rather it focuses on slate strategy and roster construction to help give you insight into how I will look to play this slate.
Thursday’s MLB DFS slate was driven by offense but not by the bats in Coors Field and instead the Orioles/Royals pivot exploded for 17 combined runs as bats like Adam Jones and Trey Mancini were two of the top four scorers on the evening. Pitching was generally gross as the top arms on the night were Eduardo Rodriguez and Mike Leake (just as we all expected) and personally my Picks and Pivots core of going all in on the Brewers and Rockies was a dud as outside of Travis Shaw, no player I rostered from that game put up double-digit fantasy points. On to the next one.
Picks and Pivots is not a simple “best plays” column but rather it focuses on slate strategy and roster construction to help give you insight into how I will look to play this slate. The goal of this article is to dig through the slate, highlight our top plays and help you identify the best slate strategy across your MLB DFS line-ups.
As always, we will look to update our final lineup thoughts throughout the day 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!
MLB DFS – Starting Pitcher Overview:
Aces everywhere! Get ready to spend up on this slate as we have Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Chris Sale all taking the hill alongside Matt Harvey. Just making sure you are paying attention folks.
Any time we have three of the top six strikeout arms on a slate I feel like you simply need to find a way to pay up and get one of these arms as the opportunity cost of dropping down and likelihood that all three dud are just simply too low. I am all for fading a chalk arm when they sit alone on a slate but I simply can’t see all three stud arms falling short tonight and I also believe there is enough value to make paying up for one of them a pretty easy roster build.
Of all the arms at the top the one I have the most interest in is Justin Verlander ($25.1K) who sits sandwiched in between Max and Sale on the salary scale with his home match-up against Texas. The Rangers strike out at a 26.2% clip against RHP this season which is the third highest mark in all of baseball and a tick above Arizona who strikes out at a 24.6% clip in their match-up with Mad Max.
Verlander is the largest favorite on the board at -260 and is the only one of the aces in their home ballpark tonight and will face off with an opponent in Texas that he dominated earlier this season in the exact same spot at home – 8 innings, 1 hit, 1 ER, 1 walk and 11 K’s for 36 FantasyDraft points in a no decision against a near perfect Bartolo Colon. Thankfully Verlander does not have to go up against the GOAT tonight so his path to a win is much more viable (yes I am kidding – kind of).
There are a ton of interesting mid-tier options I have my eye on including Jameson Taillon and Sonny Gray who get home starts against the Giants and A’s respectively. Taillon gets to attack the same match-up we just went to with the Phillies right-handers in Zach Eflin, Aaron Nola and Nick Pivetta who all had 7, 12 and 9 strikeouts in their starts and if you need an arm with upside in the mid-tier I think this is an interesting spot to save salary.
Gray is one of the cheapest arms on the slate at just over $12K and after back to back impressive outings against the Indians and Astros where he went 6 innings in each start, giving up 2 ER per game and striking out 11 batters in those two games, this is a nice little revenge spot against his former Oakland team.
If you really need the go high/low tonight than you can drop ALL the way down to the lowest priced arm on the slate in Matt Koch ($8.1K). Ignore the name for a second and let me just present this argument – would you be interested in a pitcher throwing at home who has gone 6 innings in three of his four starts and has yet to give up more than 2 ER in any of his previous 4 starts? Oh by the way those starts were in Philadelphia and also against the Dodgers and Astros.
Yes you can play the regression card as his xFIP and SIERA of 4.3 are 2 runs higher than his ERA so sure the metrics say this run cannot last forever and Koch simply does not have the K upside to offset a few bad innings but this is a pure price play – you are taking about a guy who has the ability to get you 16-18 FPTS and he is priced well below both arms in Coors Field and Matt Freakin Harvey. For a guy who has done nothing but pitch well this is a great way to go high/low , pair with Verlander AND get double down leverage off Mad Max by pivoting to JV and taking the opposing arm against him tonight.
MLB DFS – Top Hitting Spots:
Happy Harvey Day! Ah remember when Matt Harvey was a dominant strikeout throwing machine taking New York City by storm? Well tonight this tilted Mets fan is all on stacking against him in his Reds debut against the Dodgers in LA. Harvey is giving up a 43% hard contact rate to hitters from both sides of the plate with a .333 ISO to left-handed batters this season and is going to face a Dodgers line-up that is priced in the mid-range across the board which means we can not only attack a great spot but also do so while still being able to afford a top end pitcher.
Cody Bellinger, Yasmani Grandal and Joc Pederson are my top three bats from the left side and they are all priced in this same $7.5K-$8K range with Grandal and Bellinger being two of my favorite plays on the entire slate. Harvey relies almost exclusively on a low 90’s fastball which over the last three seasons these two hitters have .300+ ISO’s against but do not over-look the right-handed bats here including Matt Kemp and Yasiel Puig. Puig ($6.6K) has struggled this year but he is now back off the DL and remember this is a hitter with a .240 ISO last year against right-handed pitching so he becomes a great way to save salary within a Dodgers stack.
With the Coors Field bats letting people down last night and with so many elite arms on the hill tonight I wonder if the ownership is a bit more deflated than we would normally see? Personally I am going right back to this game as part of my core build as we have Chad Bettis and Brandon Woodruff on the mound, neither of whom is a pitcher I am afraid to attack in a hitter’s park like this.
Bettis throughout his career has actually been a reverse splits arm, giving up 1.4 HR/9 to RHB versus .7 HR/9 to LHB so although I do love Travis Shaw in this spot, I think building a stack centered around Ryan Braun and Lorenzo Cain is actually the way to attack this spot. Over the last two years Bettis has been able to limit his fly ball rate to under 30% against left-handed bats so I would avoid Christian Yelich here who is a ground ball bitter (which plays right into Bettis wheelhouse) and attack the hitters from the right side as they have a higher hard contact rate and a fly ball rate nearly 11% higher. Shaw is a fly ball hitter against RHP so I actually like how he matches up here against Bettis and it doesn’t hurt he is 3 for 6 with a homer against him in his career.
Personally I am finding my core tonight will be in Coors Field again with a Dodgers stack built around it as the pricing is such in LA that it allows you to still get a high-end arm and even pay up for a bat like Charlie Blackmon ($10.7K) who is on the right side of his platoon advantage at home tonight.
MLB DFS Sample Line-Up and Slate Overview:
The line-up below is meant to be illustrative only to further back-up the logic laid out in previous slides and is not meant to be an optimal line-up or a roster you simply plug and play on your own!
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SP: Justin Verlander ($25.1K)
SP: Matt Koch ($8.1K)
IF: Cody Bellinger ($8.2K)
IF: Yasmani Grandal ($7.5K)
IF: Travis Shaw ($8.1K)
OF: Charlie Blackmon ($10.7K)
OF: Joc Pederson ($7.7K)
OF: Yasiel Puig ($6.6K)
UTIL: Ryan Braun ($9K)
UTIL: Lorenzo Cain ($8.9K)
Slate Overview: When I sat down and looked at this slate at first glance my notes were pretty straight forward – I felt it was critical to pay up for one of Verlander, Max or Sale and I wanted to build my core bats around Coors Field and the Dodgers stack against Harvey. Now there are certainly ways to make this work including paying all the way down at SP2 for someone like Koch when then allows you the salary to grab a one-off bat like Blackmon but I do believe there are other great mid-tier arms like Taillon and Gray that can be used in a similar build if you are willing to pivot down a bit for your bats and look to get more secondary exposure to Coors with guys like Carlos Gonzalez ($7.2K) as an example. Enjoy the slate all and we will see you back here Saturday.
Best of luck in your MLB DFS contests across FantasyDraft, FanDuel and DraftKings and stay tuned to Fantasy CPR for all your latest MLB DFS picks and plays!