MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Monday September 17
Welcome to the Monday 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.
I hope you all had a great weekend with some Jon Lester dominance on Saturday followed by a full Sunday of NFL DFS action – now we can jump back into some MLB DFS for the week and build up our bankroll heading into Week 3 of the NFL season.
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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:
As we head down the home stretch in MLB DFS we will need to keep a watchful eye on playoff positioning and look for spots where value opens up and line-ups turn over to value plays from the minor league systems. Tonight, we have a solid 12 game slate with some rain concerns on the East Coast, specifically in Baltimore and Philadelphia (later in the game) with Pittsburgh looking like the worst spot on the night as the Pirates and Royals battle where if it plays, Joe Musgrove may be one of the better value arms on the night.
Patrick Corbin ($23.3K) is the top arm on the slate both in terms of price and recent performance as his 32.8% K rate over the last month is 8th in baseball and the top mark of any pitcher on this slate. Corbin will take on a Cubs team he faced earlier this season in Wrigley, striking out 9 batter over 7 innings of one-run ball on his way to 32+ fantasy points on the night. Corbin has gone for 20+ fantasy points in 7 of his last 8 games and has at least 7 strikeouts in each of his last 10 starts so this is an elite and consistent K arm that makes sense to build around as your SP1 tonight.
Zack Wheeler ($20.2K) is not far behind Corbin in terms of his recent performance with a 29.1% K rate over the last month and has put up 28+ fantasy points in four of his last five times on the bump. The match-up today with the Phillies in Citizens Bank Park is a boom or bust as the Phillies projected line-up does have a decent 21% K rate but the ballpark with projected 10 MPH winds blowing out, could be an issue for Wheeler here.
The thing with Wheeler that just jumps out at you is his incredible 25% hard contact rate allowed on the season – so we have a high K arm who limits hard contact and keeps the ball on the ground while limiting HR’s (.72 HR/9). As a Mets fan, I have been hesitant to buy-in to Wheeler as this top-tier ace but the results have been there nearly all year for the right-hander and even at $20K, there is still profit to be had on Wheels tonight.
Erick Fedde ($10.4K) makes for an interesting punt play on this slate as an SP2 after two dominant high K outings against the Phillies and Cardinals where he struck out where he struck out 16 batters in 10.2 innings of work and will now take on a Marlins team in Miami that has struck out at a league leading 28% clip over the last two weeks.
If you want to go high/low on this slate with Fedde and either Corbin or Wheeler, it will give you the ability to still pick and choose some of the top-end bats on this slate or you can go all-in on pitching with both Corbin and Wheeler and still have just over $7K per batter to fill out your roster.
MLB DFS – Top Hitting Spots:
What if I told you, you could pay up for two high K arms like Corbin and Wheeler tonight and still get a stack against a fly-ball pitcher with a .215+ ISO mark to hitters from both sides of the plate that has a 40%+ HC rate and a near 2 HR/9 mark on the season – well, then you will want some Minnesota Twins bats against Jordan Zimmermann tonight!
The nice part about stacking against Zimmermann (besides that hes not all that good of a pitcher) is that he pretty much has the same poor numbers to either side of the plate so this is a nice mix and match stack where you do not have to play traditional platoon splits. There is some really cheap power in this Twins line-up with guys like Eddie Rosario and Jake Cave both sporting .210+ ISO marks against RHP this season and if you dig into the pitch types for Zimmermann, he relies almost entirely on a fastball/slider combination and guys like Rosario and Max Kepler both crush the slider specifically with .320 and .233 ISO marks respectively against that pitch type.
The only Twins bat above $8K tonight is Eddie Rosario so this becomes a really inexpensive stack with guys like Logan Forsythe ($5.5K) hitting smack in the middle of the order and you can use the Minnesota bats to either build around pitcher or save salary as a secondary stack to afford bigger bats elsewhere.
At this point in the season for MLB DFS, I am going to focus more heavily on tournament play as we head down the stretch which means I will likely avoid a chalk offense tonight like the Brewers and hope variance is on my side.
There is one game tonight that has arguably two of the worst pitchers on the slate but with mediocre offense and the worst hitting park on the board – I doubt many will look to the Giants-Padres game for offense. Andrew Suarez from a pure metrics perspective looks like a pitcher we can attack as he has given up a .220 ISO and 45% HC rate to right-handed batters this season and this Padres team has some big time lefty mashers.
Wil Myers, Hunter Renfroe and Franmil Reyes all have .230+ ISO marks against LHP this season with each one having a 43% or higher hard contact rate which would seem to set up perfectly against Suarez tonight. Renfroe at $9.4K is going to be completely ignored at his price point but even Myers ($8.2K) and Reyes ($7.6K) are not overly cheap options so I love the idea of taking low-ownership home run shots on guys where the metrics on both sides of the match-up seem to indicate big time power upside!
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: Patrick Corbin ($23.3K)
SP: Zack Wheeler ($20.2K)
IF: Jorge Polanco ($7.6K)
IF: Logan Forsythe ($5.5K)
IF: Wil Myers ($8.2K)
OF: Eddie Rosario ($8.2K)
OF: Max Kepler ($7.3K)
OF: Robbie Grossman ($6.4K)
UTIL: Franmil Reyes ($7.6K)
UTIL: Jake Marisnick ($5.7K)
Slate Overview: From here until the end of the season, I will likely focus more on tournament play only and avoid cash games which means I will likely count on variance to spoil the chalk hitting spots and build around high K arms and cheap power stacks. I honestly did not set out today to create a Twins/Padres stack but here we are. My guess is most will look to jam in the Brewers pricey bats as the only team with a 5+ run total on the board so instead, I will focus on building around pitching and taking my shots with bats against Jordan Zimmermann and Andrew Suarez. Good luck all.
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