MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Thursday August 16
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.
Of course the night I finally pay up for Ronald Acuna Jr. he gets beaned by a pitch in his first at bat and has to leave the game! Such is MLB DFS life I suppose. Overall, anchoring to Gerrit Cole last night ended up being a key path to success as the Astros right-hander struck out 12 batters as the highest scoring pitcher of the night and while the Dodgers did not “go off” as expected, they did score 4 runs and 3 of their core players gave us double-digit fantasy points. The real difference makers on the night though were the Mets bats, as they exploded for 16 runs against Dylan Bundy and the Orioles with Brandon Nimmo and Todd Frazier putting up nearly 80 fantasy points between the two of them which when combined with Cole, gave you the top three raw point performers on the night.
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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:
I think my scroll button is broken. I am trying to scroll up to the top of the pitching options and FantasyDraft is showing Clay Buchholz is the most expensive pitcher on the slate – that cannot be right can it? Not only do we have horrible pitching options but we also have weather in two games (Pittsburgh and KC) and the Mets/Phillies game is not on the slate due to it being the tail-end of a double-header which takes Zach Eflin out of play and leaves us with 14 pitchers to sort through on a smaller 7 game MLB DFS slate.
Just step back and look at the arms on this slate – Clay Buchholz, Tanner Roark, Jon Gray, Julio Teheran, Ervin Santana, Ivan Nova, Francisco Liriano and some guy named Glenn Sparkman (I am 93% sure that last guy is actually a real estate agent who sells condos in Arizona and has one of those bus bench advertisements).
Guys – it is so bad – so bad – that me, Brian Tulloch, am being…forced…to..consider….Jon…Lester.
I can’t believe I had to type that in Picks and Pivots but this my friends, this is where we are today.
A few thoughts on how I want to approach this slate – ownership matters more than usual to me – there is no pitcher worth being chalk today, not a one, so today is a day I will keep an eye out on the industry and see if any of these horrible arms becomes chalk. Secondly, there is essentially no opportunity cost of missing at SP today – we all have the same terrible options and there is no Gerrit Cole type on this slate capable of setting the cash line, it is simply a case where I want pitchers who don’t get destroyed. Honestly, it would not shock me if we look back on Friday morning and not a single pitcher eclipsed the 20 fantasy point mark on FantasyDraft.
Of all the arms available to us, there is one that stands out to me above the rest – Jon Gray ($16.9K).
Gray has the highest K rate of any arm on this slate with a 27.1% K rate and although the Braves do not strike out at a high rate, they will likely be without Acuna in their line-up tonight which takes one of the best hitters out of this line-up. Since his re-call from the minors on July 14 , Gray has pitched really well in his five big league outings, with a 2.27 ERA that has come with a scaled back 21.4% K rate. Over those five games, Gray is striking out just under 6 batters per game and has put up 23 or more FPTS in four of those five outings which include starts at Milwaukee, at St. Louis and home for Houston and Seattle.
Gray to me is the best option on this slate from an upside perspective as he has the highest K upside of any arm in action and all year-long this has been a pitcher with positive regression coming his way as his 4.81 ERA is well above his 3.1 xFIP and his .337 BABIP is well above the ML average of .293.
One arm I thought I would be interested in was Sam Gaviglio against the Royals but there are some troubling red flags to point out here. First off, Gaviglio’s “upside” comes from his 27% K rate against RHB but this KC line-up is likely to roll out only 2-3 right-handed batters which means Gaviglio and his 15% K rate against lefties has lost a significant amount of his appeal. Secondly, the fact that Vegas has the Royals as the third highest scoring team on the slate should really tell us something – this KC line-up is projected to score nearly a full run higher than their season average which just seems super fishy. I wonder if Sammy G becomes chalk as people love picking on this Royals line-up – could this be the chalk we need to avoid?
The more I look at this slate, the more I am finding myself using Gray as my SP1, building the bats I want and then working backwards to find an SP2 I can tolerate – with that in mind let’s jump to the bats and see how this build can continue.
MLB DFS – Top Hitting Spots:
For all the awful arms on this slate you would think the offensive options would be plentiful but the truth is we only have two teams (Twins/Royals) that have 5+ run totals – seriously the post trade deadline Twins and Royals are the two highest projected scoring teams.
Now it is possible that things could change once we get an Angels/Texas Vegas total as this to me seems like the ideal stacking environment – by every measure the ballpark in Arlington is the top hitting spot on the Main Slate and we have 95 degree temperatures with Ariel Jurado and an Angels bullpen game taking the hill – I think if you are building stacks you start here.
Note: The Vegas totals are now out as I assumed – the game opened with an 11 total with the Rangers having a 6 implied run total. The high total alone should make this the chalk stack of the slate but still think you need to start here.
The Angels will take on a pitcher in Ariel Jurado who just got smoked by the Yankees and as I pointed out the last time he pitched, you cannot be a one pitch starter at the Major League level and considering he throws his sinker nearly 70% of the time, ML hitters are going to find a way to punish someone like Jurado who has a miniscule 9.2% K rate.
The big three – Justin Upton, Kole Calhoun and Shohei Ohtani – make for the perfect three man stack on this slate as Jurado has been equally bad to hitters from both sides of the plate, with a .294 ISO to LHB and a .267 ISO to RHB. Both Calhoun and Ohtani profile extremely well against the sinker as well as Calhoun has a .350 ISO against the pitch this year while Ohtani is sitting over .300 in his first season in the bigs.
The Rangers side is tougher to profile as RHP Taylor Cole gets the “start” but considering he only lasted 1.1 innings against Oakland and threw under 40 pitches, we should expect 9 innings of bullpen action here for the Texas bats. The Angels bullpen ERA is actually top 10 in baseball this year but the fact they have used two of their best relievers (Bedrosian/Parker) in two of the last three games (including both last night), could we get the secondary relievers like Hansel Robles for an extended period of time?
As a Mets fan, I can tell you – if Hansel Robles gets extended work tonight, you are going to want Texas bats, like all of them – they might all hit HR’s in that scenario.
Rather than try to get cute and figure out splits, my focus is just on taking the best pure hitters here – Joey Gallo, Jurickson Profar, Rougned Odor and Shin-Soo Choo – and considering the Angels are a mostly right-handed heavy pen, it will be tough for the Angels to do too much mixing and matching tonight when they will need all hands on deck in a bullpen game.
One item to note – Nomar Mazara has been rehabbing in the minors and there is a chance he could return tonight – keep an eye on this lineup before lock tonight as he could be low owned in his first start back if people are not paying attention.
If there is any one-off play I want tonight it is going to be Anthony Rizzo who simply crushes in Pittsburgh and will be facing a pitcher in Ivan Nova who struggles with left-handed batters. Rizzo has 14 HR’s in 56 games at PNC Park with a .322 average and over a 1.000 OPS and homered in 2 of the 5 games they have played there in 2018.
And yes – it is Jon Lester day – the regression has hit hard and if you want to stack the Pirates, you know I shall support it – the reality is, on this slate as much as Lester is awful, there are simply too many other better spots to pick on so I will save my stack against Lester speech for another day.
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: Jon Gray ($16.9K)
SP: Francisco Liriano ($11K)
IF: Anthony Rizzo ($9K)
IF: Joey Gallo ($9K)
IF: Jurickson Profar ($8.8K)
OF: Justin Upton ($10.2K)
OF: Shohei Ohtani ($7.9K)
OF: Kole Calhoun ($8.4K)
UTIL: Shin-Soo Choo ($9.9K)
UTIL: Rougned Odor ($8.7K)
Slate Overview: So if we work backwards here, lock in Gray, Rizzo and a Texas/Angels game stack as shown we are left with around $11K for our SP2 which lands us at Francisco Liriano against a Twins team with the highest projected total on the board. Could I talk myself into Liriano? Sure – this Twins projected line-up has a 25.4% K rate against LHP this season and Liriano has given up 3 or fewer ER in 8 of his last 9 outings. Now I am not going to sit here and try to convince you Liriano is a good play – when it comes to pitching tonight, I am not sure a “good play” exists – it’s a hold your nose and hope they get you positive points kind of night.
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