MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Sunday August 19
Welcome to the Sunday 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.
Another night for Picks and Pivots built around the Dodgers and boy, until the late innings it looked bleak but with home runs from Justin Turner, Max Muncy and Cody Bellinger, this Dodgers offense was able to salvage a night where once again the bats came in at single digit ownership in GPP play.
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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:
At the top of the pitching spectrum today we have two large home favorite in J.A. Happ and Mike Clevinger, who both step to the mound with 230 and 280 Vegas money-line favorites to back them up as strong cash game run prevention plays against bad offenses in the Jays and Orioles. However if I am paying up today, I will gladly drop down to German Marquez ($18K) who is pitching at an incredible level and has arguably the highest upside of any arm on the entire slate.
Since June 30, a span of 8 starts, the Rockies right-hander has a 30% K rate, a 13.6% swinging strike rate and has gone for 20 plus fantasy points in 7 of those 8 outings, including tough spots against offenses like the Dodgers, Arizona, Seattle, Oakland, Milwaukee and Houston.
There is nothing about this run that seems fluky either as his 2.91 ERA is actually higher than his 2.58 xFIP and his BABIP at .280 is right at the league average mark so Marquez is an elite DFS play that remains priced for something far below what is output is telling us. A road start against a dangerous Braves offense is really the only drawback here but with his recent form and looking through the offenses he has beaten already, I think you side with the pitcher here and build around Marquez as an SP1.
Luis Castillo ($14.5K) is an arm I feel like I try to make work more often than I should, maybe anchoring back to his 2017 season too often when he looks like a much less effective K arm here in 2018. Digging deeper though, there are some interesting splits with the reds right-hander that are tough to ignore for me today at home against the Giants.
Castillo has an ERA of 3.94 at home (with a 3.88 xFIP) which is massively lower than his near 7 road ERA but the biggest difference seemingly comes in his strikeout ability as he has a top-tier K rate of 27.1% at home versus 17.8% on the road.
Take a look at Castillo’s game log as the most obvious example of his fantasy production at how it swings home and away.
Home Fantasy Point Output: 13, 35, 16, 21, 17, 19 and 20
Away Fantasy Point Output: 9, 8, 4, 4, 4, 4 and 11
When you factor in Castillo’s home splits and the fact this Giants offense is ice-cold, ranking dead last in baseball with a .076 ISO the last two weeks, there is an interesting combination of run prevention and K upside for a pitcher who has hit double-digit FPTS in each of his last 7 home starts and has flashed 20+ FPT upside which is more than enough to pay off this value price tag.
MLB DFS – Top Hitting Spots:
All the usual big offenses are in play today and without any big spends for pitchers, finding the salary to stack the Indians, Red Sox or Yankees will be a relatively easy build today but there is one team in a similar price point that I love as a pivot – The Milwaukee Brewers.
The Brewers have a relatively mediocre 4.2 run projection, 9th highest on this slate, and with price points on FantasyDraft in the $8-9$K range, this is a higher end stack that I think will get over-looked, but personally I think its a great GPP differentiator on this 11 game Main Slate.
RHP Jon Gant will take the mound for the Cardinals as a pitcher who is giving up a .190 ISO to LHB and a whopping 57% HC rate! Gant is essentially a two pitch pitcher, throwing a sinker/change-up to lefties this season for a combined 80% of his pitches and if we focus on the big four lefties in this Milwaukee line-up, Eric Thames, Mike Moustakas, Travis Shaw and Christian Yelich, we will see this four-some has strong numbers against the pitch types that Gant features.
- Moustakas: .264 ISO versus sinker and .170 ISO versus change-up with a .228 ISO versus RHP in 2018
- Yelich: .163 ISO versus sinker and .231 ISO versus change-up with a .202 ISO versus RHP in 2018
- Shaw: .447 ISO versus sinker and .194 ISO versus change-up with a .285 ISO versus RHP in 2018
- Thames: .440 ISO versus sinker and .219 ISO versus change-up with a .293 ISO versus RHP in 2018
The Brewers are in many ways just like the Dodgers for me, a team that is loaded with elite bats from a metrics perspective as the projected line-up has a .219 ISO versus RHP this season with guys like Jesus Aguilar and Jonathan Schoop sporting .200+ ISO marks themselves.
The lefties are the priority for me since Gant has been able to limit HC and ISO to RHB but he does have a double-digit walk rate to righties and Aguilar and Schoop have the talent to make using them as a full stack a viable strategy at likely super low ownership.
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: German Marquez
SP: Luis Castillo
IF: Travis Shaw
IF: Eric Thames
IF: Mike Moustakas
OF: Christian Yelich
OF: Phillip Ervin
OF: Shohei Ohtani
UTIL: Eugenio Suarez
UTIL: Kendrys Morales
Slate Overview: For me the core build at first glance starts with Marquez and a four man lefty Brewer stack and using Castillo as my SP2 opens up a ton of salary to take on some solid one-off plays and mini stacks including the Reds RHB. The Reds are at home against a LHP in Andrew Suarez who is giving up .201 ISO and 46% HC rate to right-handed batters this season – I am not sure there is a better one-off play on the slate than Eugenio Suarez who has a .320 ISO on the season against LHP. Good luck today all – enjoy your Sunday!
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