MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Friday August 31
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.
What a high scoring night in MLB DFS we had on Thursday and looking back it was the chalk that won the night. First off, a near universally owned German Marquez (82% in the $25 GPP on FantasyDraft as an example) just went out and dominated the Padres to the tune of 13K’s and a slate leading 38 fantasy points so if you faded him on this slate, it was a good idea for game theory but you were left dead in the water, proving sometimes eating good chalk is the way to go. Offensively the chalky Yankees and Red Sox bats delivered with home runs from the most popular bats on the slate in Giancarlo Stanton, Mookie Betts, J.D. Martinez and Luke Voit all hitting bombs at 20%+ ownership in tournaments which pushed the cash line in all contests higher and higher every time the chalk hit. Sometimes, chalk is chalk for a reason.
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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:
Opening up today’s slate and sorting through the starting pitching it appears at first glance we have a plethora of viable options at the top and not much in the value range to get excited about but the more I look at it, the more I think even the top priced arms are a tad over-valued.
We have three (four if you include Corey Kluber at 19.9K) starting pitchers tonight over $20K to choose from including Kluber, Luis Severino, Zack Greinke and Zack Wheeler and although the arms on paper are all solid, there is not a single one of them with a K rate over 27% the last month.
If you were looking to spend up in the range, I would take Greinke out of consideration with a match-up against the Dodgers – this is just not a line-up that I think you need to pick on with a full slate of MLB DFS action. The fact that Corey Kluber is the cheapest of the bunch and is a -220 home favorite against Tampa Bay will likely lead him to be the most popular option and he would seem to be a safe cash game option on this slate. Wheeler on the road in a great ballpark in San Francisco looks ideal and his recent game log showing a double-digit K game against this same Giants team will draw peoples eyes and then you have Severino, tonight’s Yankee chalk pitcher – following in every Yankee arm during the White Sox series and JA Happ last night – if you have played any/all of those arms you know that chalk does not taste so great.
So while all of those options are fine – honestly, they feel over-priced and lack any real “must have” upside in my opinion which is leading me to look more towards the mid-tier arms.
Hyun Jin Ryu ($15.8K) has pitched three games since coming off the DL in mid-August, going 72, 86 and 89 pitches with a 27% K rate and 10% swinging strike rate with 23+ fantasy points in two of those three outings. The limited pitch count and tendency for Dodgers arms to go limited innings seems priced in today for Ryu but he packs the kind of K upside even in limited innings to where if he gets you 20-23 FPTS here, you likely are keeping pace with the owners who spend up for the top arms mentioned above.
I hope the focus in the Mets/Giants game with a slate low 7 total is on the Mets Wheeler because I actually would prefer to take the savings and drop down to the Giants left-hander Andrew Suarez ($15.3K) in this spot. If you look at Suarez’s splits he has a similar 20-21% K rate to hitters from both sides of the plate but just simply dominated left-handed batters from a power perspective, limiting them to only a .074 ISO with a 65% GB rate! You know what the Mets are loaded with? Left-handed batters – Conforto, McNeil, Nimmo, Bruce – basically the core batters you would be “worried” about here all play into Suarez’s sweet spot. This projected Mets line-up has a 25% K rate against LHP this season and with the only RHB being guys like Amed Rosario, Todd Frazier and Austin Jackson – considering the ballpark, I am happy to use Suarez at this price point for both cash games and GPP play.
If you need a bit more savings and want to take a shot with someone with a bit more unknown, Framber Valdez ($14K) against the Angels could be an intriguing option as the left-hander makes his third appearance this year for the red-hot Astros. Valdez just made his first ML start against this same Angels team, going 5 innings with 3 K’s and 16.25 fantasy points an although there is nothing eye-popping about the outing, what stands out to me is Valdez’s pedigree sporting a 30% K rate across his AA-AAA seasons in 2018. I mentioned this yesterday but with the season-ended injury to Albert Pujols, you are taking out a low K, high contact hitter in the middle of that Angles order and even with Trout/Upton back this is still a line-up with a 21% K rate against LHP. The rub with Valdez is that he has not yet gone over 80 pitches so personally, I would rather just pay the extra for a similar top spot with Ryu who has a better track record of strikeout performance at the ML level.
Update – One pitcher I wanted to provide a quick update on is Nathan Eovaldi ($17.1K) at home against the White Sox who I initially dismissed but as Stephen Young from Rotogrinders pointed out on his Morning Grind podcast today, Pedro Martinez noticed something off in his delivery and went to Fenway to work with him.
Now that alone is not enough to get back on him after a string of 4 poor starts but if you dig deeper into those outings, he has an insanely high .446 BABIP which tells me there is some bad luck related to those starts especially since his walk rate, swinging strike rate and hard contact rates remained nearly identical to his season long numbers. Now take that idea of some “bad luck” and overlay it with these quotes from Alex Cora in this article from WEEI.com.
"Another change that will be noticeable when Eovaldi takes on the White Sox is how the Red Sox are positioned behind him.Cora explained prior to Thursday night’s game that the team wasn’t happy with how their infield alignment had been shaking out with Eovaldi on the mound, leading to changes this time around.“I think we’re going to make an adjustment defensively against lefties. We’re probably going to shift a little more,” the Red Sox manager said. “When we talk about Blake playing third base when he started I told you guys there aren’t that many balls going that way. I think we’re going to make the adjustments now, shift against lefties and see where it goes. There are too many balls going by.”"
So not only does he have Pedro working with him but the BABIP issues seem to be clearly noticed by the manager and they will look to put the fielders in better position. Tack on the high K upside of this White Sox team and I am starting to get excited about this spot.
MLB DFS – Top Hitting Spots:
We have another night where the Yankees have a 6+ projected run total at home, the highest on the slate and we have an 11 game total in Arlington between the Rangers and Twins so I think finding the chalk will be relatively easy but sometimes as we saw last night, sometimes the chalk is the chalk for a season. Personally, I tend to fade the chalk offenses more than chalk pitchers just because of the variance that lies in MLB DFS where the pitching tends to be more consistent while even the best hitters in the game will have underwhelming nights at the plate. If you want to play the Yankees or stack up Arlington, I will not talk you out of it – but I think there are viable pivot options tonight in similar great hitting environments.
Looking at the ballpark factors on this slate there is one park that ranks tops for HR power to hitters from both sides of the plate and that is Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia where Nick Pivetta and Jose Quintana will face-off.
Pivetta is similar to many of the Phillies pitchers in that they tend to match-up best against right-handed heavy line-ups where Pivetta struggles with LHB to the tune of a 1.7 HR/9 against them this season. Not only does Pivetta have to pitch in this tough park, but he is going to face a Chicago Cubs line-up that is loaded with lefty power with guys like Anthony Rizzo, Daniel Murphy, Kyle Schwarber, Jason Heyward and Ben Zobrist up and down this Cubs line-up.
Pivetta relies heavily on a FB/CB combination to LHB and Rizzo and Schwarber in particular profile really well here with Rizzo sporting a .228/.458 ISO combo against those pitch types/velocities while Schwarber is right there with him at .216/.280.
On the other side of this game, LHP Jose Quintana is in an equally bad spot for this platoon splits as this is an arm giving up a .200 ISO versus RHB on the season against a Phillies team that will/can go essentially with all right-handed hitters. Quintana has only made one start in Philly the last two years and got blasted in 2017 for 6 ER in only 5 innings of work and will have to navigate a group of powerful Phillies hitters including Rhys Hoskins and Wilson Ramos who have. 229 and .219 ISO marks against LHP since 2017.
The nice part about this Phillies stack is that there is not a single bat above $9K so the stack is relatively easy to build around the higher priced bats like Hoskins and Ramos but you can extend it to cheaper options from the right-side like lead-off man Roman Quinn or bottom of the order bats like Jose Bautista and Maikel Franco.
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: Hyun-Jin Ryu ($15.8K)
SP: Andrew Suarez ($15.3K)
IF: Anthony Rizzo ($9.5K)
IF: Daniel Murphy ($8.6K)
IF: Wilson Ramos ($8.8K)
OF: Rhys Hoskins ($8.9K)
OF: Roman Quinn ($8.4K)
OF: Jose Bautista ($7.3K)
UTIL: Kyle Schwarber ($8.2K)
UTIL: Eugenio Suarez ($9.1K)
Slate Overview: I am excited to see how people view this slate – I always write this article early in the morning before I look at anyone else’s stuff so I am interested to see how the rest of the industry and how the readers plan to attack this slate. There is seemingly some solid high-end pitching but there is an argument to be made that it is over-priced and it looks like there are some obvious chalk stacks that will warrant a high level of ownership in New York and the game in Texas. This Philly/Chicago game has a 9 run total and neither team above 4.6 projected runs which when you consider we have 6-7 teams with 5+ run totals already on this slate, leads me to believe they will be a bit-overlooked against two pitchers in Quintana/Pivetta in a match-up where their weaknesses could be significantly exploited.
I will be taking the weekend off from MLB DFS and Picks and Pivots so will be back here on Tuesday – enjoy your Labor Day weekend everyone and best of luck!
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