MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Thursday May 17
Welcome to the Thursday 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.
Wednesday’s MLB DFS action was absolutely dominated by starting pitching as the top three scoring options on the Early Slate were Trevor Bauer, J.A. Happ and Nick Pivetta while the Main Slate was no different with Justin Verlander, Chris Sale and Brandon McCarthy leading the charge as the top raw point performers.
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 Pitching Overview:
Remember how yesterday’s slate was dominated by pitching with some of the best in the league all taking the mound? Well when you open up today’s slate and see Cole Hamels and David Price at the top of the pitching pricing you will fondly remember that slate and quickly realize it is not 2012 anymore and Hamels and Price should never be the top arms available to us in MLB DFS.
It is unlikely that pitching is what wins you this slate as we simply do not have the high strikeout arms available to us but what is interesting to me is that even with all these mediocre arms, we only have one team with a projected run total over 5 which basically means we have a slate full of blah to sort through – excited yet?
In all seriousness, slates like this are some of my favorite as there are no obvious plays and I tend to listen to the industry buzz even more so on days like today to understand where the ownership could go as it is a viable strategy on night’s like this to simply play the pitchers with the lowest ownership. Do you want to play a chalk Cole Hamels in 2018? Come on now.
To me the arm I like the most at the top is Tyler Skaggs ($20.7K) who has a 25% K rate on the season and will take on a Rays team that is striking out at a 25.3% rate versus LHP which is the second highest mark on the slate. The only issue here for me is the price tag and the recent form of this Rays team as over the last two weeks their K rate has dropped to only 20% so I am not sure the upside is there relative to this inflated price point for the Angels left-hander but he is my top SP on this slate if you take price out of the equation.
My initial feeling looking at this slate as I will likely go heavy on bats and live in the mid to lower tier in picking my pitchers as I think the opportunity cost of “missing” on pitcher tonight is so low in that I simply cannot see a scenario where I needed to have “Pitcher X” in order to cash tonight and will be happy taking cheaper options that give me some K upside while allowing me the salary savings to pay up for bats.
Andrew Triggs ($13.8K) has a 24.6% K rate on the season and will take on a Blue Jays team tonight in Toronto that is striking out at a 27.4% clip over the last two weeks which is second highest of all the teams on this main slate. Triggs profiles really well against this Toronto team that struggles against the slider as he uses that pitch roughly 26% of the time in his career and has generated a 30% whiff % rate on that pitch this season as one of his primary punch out pitches.
Since 2016, the projected Toronto line-up has 6 of their 9 batters with 35% or higher Whiff % rates against the slider and this Blue Jays team has a one of the highest O-Swing % rates in baseball at 31% this season which means they like to chase pitches outside the zone. I think there is some sneaky K upside here for Triggs and the fact he is on the road as a slight underdog (118) should keep the ownership down to a reasonable level on him this evening.
One of the things I like to do is look around the different DFS sites first thing and skim through their strikeout predictions for the slate to see if anything jumps out to me and it was telling that Jeff Samardzija ($13.7K) had some of the highest K props on the board (which also tells you everything you need to know about pitching on this slate). The match-up looks solid no matter how you slice it for Shark as the Rockies have a K rate in the 24% range over the last two weeks, with a similar mark on the road this season so there is certainly strikeout potential here but this is the kind of player/name I think could gain ownership today just because the underlying metrics are decent and the ballpark in SF should benefit the pitcher so be careful locking in Shark if he becomes a popular SP2 as his 6+ xFIP says things look like they will get worse before they get better.
Chris Archer ($13.9K) will likely draw ownership just as a result of his name value and price point on a slate where pitching is simply awful but there is certainly merit to using him here tonight. Archer has always had strong strikeout upside but his K rate is down nearly 6% this season (down to 22.8%) and tonight he has to face a dangerous Angels line-up in Anaheim. As much as I like Archer as a pitcher, I simply cannot use him on the road – go ahead and look at his stats the last 3 seasons on the roads as he has massive splits, sporting a 6 ERA and a K rate that is 5-6% below his home marks. Like Shark, this could be a spot where the name drives the ownership without digging into the underlying numbers.
Marco Gonzales ($13.2K) is one of the largest favorites on the board (-165) as he gets a home start against the Tigers and I suspect most will shy away when they open up his game logs and see his last start against this very same Detroit team where he gave up 10 hits and 4 ER but I think there is reason to go right back to the spot tonight. Gonzales has a 3.47 SIERA and 3.07 xFIP on the season which screams positive regression when you look at his 5.31 ERA on the season and .400+ BABIP.
When you consider that Gonzales is priced in the same range as Samardzija and Chris Archer, I expect the “name value” of Shark and Archer combined with the quick game log glance leaves Gonzales substantially under-owned tonight and against this Tigers line-up that may have lost JaCoby Jones yesterday, further weakening one of the worst line-ups in all of baseball.
If there is one arm I think that has the ability to “break the slate” it would be Vincent Velasquez ($14.8K) who takes his 31.2% K rate against right-handed bats to the mound against a Cardinals team that is right-handed heavy. Velazquez is coming off a 12 strikeout game against the Giants so this is a spot that game log watchers may jump all over but if you find yourself in this price tier, then he has arguably the most upside of any arm on the slate.
UPDATE: Much like yesterday we get some in day pitching changes as the Braves have put Mike Sorotka on the DL and called up LHP Max Fried ($8K) to start tonight. Fried is one of the top prospects in the Braves system and was ranked as the 78th best overall prospect this season by Fangraphs. Fried is the former 7th overall pick in the 2012 draft that throws a low to mid 90’s fastball with a nasty 12-6 curveball and has demonstrated strikeout upside throughout his minor league career. Fried made 4 starts for Atlanta at the end of last season including in Wrigley against this same Cubs team and went 5 innings, striking out 4 and only giving up 1 run. At this price point you can go high low with Skaggs/Fried and load up on ALL the bats you want tonight.
MLB DFS – Top Hitting Spots:
It seems like every single day the Red Sox have the highest implied team total and although the top dogs like Mookie Betts ($10.9K) and J.D. Martinez ($9.9K) are popular it seems like the expanded stack is rarely high owned. Take last night as an example, where remember we can stack up to 6 hitters on FantasyDraft, in GPP play Betts, JD, Benintendi and Hanley were all 25% plus owned but when you expanded the stack to guys like Moreland and Bogaerts the ownership on them was only 9-10%.
Tonight against Kevin Gausman I think going back to a full 6 man Red Sox stack is absolutely in play as Gausman is a pitcher who struggles with home runs to hitters from both sides of the plate with slightly reverse splits as evidenced by his 1.45 HR/9 to RHB in his career. On a slate without any top end pitching to pay for, paying up for the best offense on the board seems like the obvious play here and although it will be popular, expanding it to a full 6 man stack could be the way to differentiate from the field.
Oh by the way for all you BvP fans – Mookie Betts is 12 for 29 with 3 bombs off Gausman in his career but you don’t need BvP to tell you to play Betts.
With James Shields pitching tonight, I would expect the Texas Rangers bats to be one of the more popular stacks on the board as everyone loves to pick on Shields in MLB DFS but let me ask you a question – how many games this season do you think Shields has given up multiple home runs? Would it surprise you to know he has not given up more than one home run in any of his eight starts and in fact has only given up four total home runs this entire season?
As much as I want to say we can fade it for game theory, it is hard to overlook the price points on Joey Gallo ($8K) and Nomar Mazara ($7.7K) as you are not only getting two batters with .250 ISO’s against RHP this season but you are also putting them in the single best park for left-handed home runs on the entire slate.
In the same price range I actually think going to Brandon Belt ($8.5K) makes the most sense as a pivot since Belt is red-hot right now, with three home runs in his last three games (all in San Francisco) and will now take on Chad Bettis, a pitcher who he is 7 for 16 against in his career.
The Cubs/Braves game is the only one with weather concerns (some thunderstorms are possible) and after it underwhelmed last night I wonder how many people go back to it with two decent arms on the mound in Mike Soroka and Jon Lester. It seems crazy to say this but I actually think the pitcher I want to pick on here is Lester and I want to go after the power/speed combination of Ozzie Albies ($10.9K) and Ronald Acuna Jr. ($8.2K) who both have elite ISO’s against LHP this season (Albies has a .440 ISO while Acuna is at a more normal elite rate of .240) and we know that Lester was one of the worst arms in all of baseball at preventing the steal last season (giving up 5th most in baseball). This could be a great spot to stack up the Braves bats, targeting home run and steal upside from arguably the best pivot stack off the Red Sox 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: Andrew Triggs ($13.8K)
SP: Marco Gonzales ($13.2K)
IF: Joey Gallo ($8K)
IF: Mitch Moreland ($9.2K)
IF: Hanley Ramirez ($8.2K)
OF: Mookie Betts ($10.9K)
OF: J.D. Martinez ($9.9K)
OF: Nomar Mazara ($7.7K)
UTIL: Ronald Acuna Jr. ($8.2K)
UTIL: Ozzie Albies ($10.9K)
Slate Overview: Looking over this slate my goal is really quite simple – load up the my favorite bats (Red Sox, Braves, Rangers) and then retro-fit in my starting pitchers. My going in position tonight is to mix and match my pitching with the mid-lower tier arms with the simply approach of avoiding the chalk. I think you can make the case for a variety of arms in this lower range and my early read is we could see the “names” of Samardzija and Archer soak up all the ownership which could mean we get guys like Triggs and Gonzales at a fraction of the ownership. Pitching is simply not my focus tonight – there is no arm I feel like I need to have so I would rather play the under-owned arms with K upside and let others determine which pitchers I want to fade. Good luck all!
Best of luck in your MLB DFS contests across FantasyDraft, FanDuel and DraftKings and stay tuned to Fantasy CPR for all the latest DFS news and analysis across all your favorite sports.