MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Friday, March 29 – Red Sox Slugfest!
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 fantasy baseball 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.
As we do each day in this section, we look back at the previous day’s winning lineups and roster trends to make sure you are identifying flaws in our process and where we can get better. The key take away for me in looking at Opening Day was how the high-end pitching dominated the scoreboard with four top arms locking up 4 of the top 6 raw point scores with Jose Berrios, Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom and Justin Verlander all having huge days. Offensively, outside of a Dodgers stack that went off in an HR Derby, it really was more about picking one-off bats that went deep with Javier Baez and Enrique Hernandez being the top bats to own. The winning GPP lineups exceeded 200 fantasy points as a result of a less than 1% owned Kolten Wong dropping 30 fantasy points at only $6.3K on FantasyDraft!
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.
Before we jump into the specific picks for today, I thought it would be helpful to dive into the basics of MLB DFS as they pertain to FantasyDraft. I know many of you, myself included, cut your teeth on sites like FanDuel and DraftKings but having played more and more on FantasyDraft, it has quickly become my favorite sites as a result of its superior roster flexibility.
Basic Roster Construction:
When building your rosters on FantasyDraft there are a few key items to keep in mind:
- You have $100,000 salary cap to build a 10 person roster which includes:
- 2 Pitchers
- 3 IF
- 3 OF
- 2 UTIL
- Rosters must include batters from at least 3 different teams
- Rosters can include up to 6 batters from one team
The biggest takeaway here should be the extreme roster flexibility – unlike other sites you are not pigeon-holed into specific positions and the ability to stack up to 6 batters from one team is unlike anything you can get on the other sites. Having the ability to ignore positions is perhaps my favorite part of playing MLB DFS on FantasyDraft as I no longer have to sort through awful SS options just because the site demands I roster one.
Scoring:
The scoring on FantasyDraft has a very similar look and feel to DraftKings for those of you who have played there previously. As it tends to do on most sites, HR’s and strikeouts are where you make your money on both sides of your roster and will be the key focus especially when building GPP rosters as we will do here each day!
Without further ado, let’s get into today’s slate!
MLB DFS – Friday Night Pitching Breakdown:
Much like we saw on Opening Day, we have a ton of great arms sitting at the top and I firmly believe that early in the season, prioritization of the elite K arms is where you need to start your builds rather than chase after the shiny priced up bats.
If you look at the second half of the 2018 season, the top 5 K arms are likely names you would expect with Opening Day studs Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom ranked 1-2-3. Rounding out the top 5 are the two top arms on today’s slate with Gerrit Cole ($21.4K) and German Marquez ($18K) sporting 33.5% and 33.9% K rates respectively.
One day after watching Justin Verlander strike out 9 Tampa Bay Rays, Cole steps into the same high K upside match-up against a projected lineup with a 24% K rate and only two batters in the entire lineup under 20%. In 2018, Cole had a 14% swinging strike rate and 34% K rate, both marks would be the top of any pitcher on this slate and I would argue much like we saw yesterday, he becomes one of the top raw point plays on the entire slate.
Marquez is a pitcher you will notice is beloved at Fantasy CPR – this was a guy that collectively we all rostered heavily down the stretch last season and was an early round building block for many of us in our season long leagues. The Rockies right-hander was every bit a top 5 arm in the 2nd half of 2018 – with a top 5 K rate and a swinging strike rate of 16% which was 5th in baseball and ahead of guys like deGrom and Mad Max.
This is an elite K arm that is not yet priced for his level of production and now he walks into a match-up with the Miami Marlins who have a 25% K rate in their projected lineup. More notably, they are a right-handed heavy team with only 2-3 LHB which is important as Marquez had a 35% K rate against RHB in 2018 versus only a 21% rate against lefties. A weak hitting, right-handed heavy lineup in Miami’s ballpark is the ideal spot to roll out Marquez and I think we will look back as the season goes on wondering how we ever rostered him for under $20K.
Much like my approach on Opening Day, I think you can make a strong case to lock in both top arms, which would leave you just under $7.6K per batter for your lineups and allow you to lock in elite K upside on the mound. Look back at Opening Day, the top arms were the ones who drove the leader-board and cash line – so lock in that stability as the foundation of your rosters and try to pick off the right bats with power around them.
MLB DFS – Which bats to target?
With the context that we want to build around BOTH Cole and Marquez, it means operating with a hitting budget of just under $7.6K for 8 hitters on our FantasyDraft rosters and I think you can approach this a few different ways but I love the idea at first glance of going extreme Stars and Scrubs with two teams in mind.
First and foremost is the Boston Red Sox, a team that was left off the Main Slate on Opening Day due to their night game against Seattle and has arguably the best lineup of any team on Friday’s slate. The Red Sox led all of baseball last season with 5.5 runs per game and tonight they take on a complete unknown in LHP Yusei Kikuchi.
Now, the unknown of Kikuchi combined with his deceptive delivery may lead folks to take a wait and see approach as it would be understandable that Major League hitters need some time to adjust to him and get him on tape in 2019.
The counter to that argument is that the big bats in this Red Sox lineup are two of the best in the business – regardless of the amount of tape they have on a pitcher. Mookie Betts ($10K) and J.D. Martinez ($9.9K) are certainly not cheap but these are two guys who MASH LHP, sporting a .271 and .315 ISO mark in 2018 against southpaws with a 44% and 45% hard contact rate respectively.
Building off this duo, may seem difficult if you are also paying up for the top arms, but there is some intriguing under-priced value in Boston depending on the roster the Red Sox roll out. Rafael Devers ($7.2K) slotted into the #3 spot in the lineup between Betts/JD is in perhaps the best spot in baseball with that kind of protection and this is a lefty who actually hits LHP well with power, sporting a .219 ISO since 2017. With Steve Pearce on the DL, it is expected that Mitch Moreland and Same Travis split the 1B duties for Boston and with a lefty on the mound, I wonder if we see Travis ($5.8K) crack the lineup here for Boston as a cheap addition to this stack with some pop.
The other big time bat on this slate that stands out is Mike Trout ($10.2K) as the Angels take on Oakland and RHP Marco Estrada. Estrada is an arm we have and can attack often as he has a low K rate (16% in 2018), while giving up a ton of power (1.82 HR/9 with a 55% FB rate) with a .233-.250 ISO mark to LHB and RHB in 2018. Estrada actually opened the season in Japan so we have a one start sample on him in 2019 which is unique – but the same long ball tendencies reared their ugly head as he gave up 2 HR in 5 IP with a near 80% FB rate!
Trout has a monster .347 ISO against RHP since 2017 and now has Justin Bour ($7.7K) and his massive power upside sitting right behind him in the Angels lineup. This is a spot where I think you can go home run hunting against Estrada with two guys sporting have .200+ ISo and 40% + HC rates against RHP since 2017.
The key to making this all work though is finding value – locking in Trout, Betts and JD alongside the top arms means we need to dumpster dive a bit but there are options within the Red Sox and Angels that could make this work. We touched on Sam Travis already but also take a look at the bottom of the Angels order – guys like Jonathan Lucroy, David Fletcher and Peter Bourjos who cost between $5.5K and $6K and give you an interesting wrap around stack at the bottom of the order before it turns back over to Trout and Bour at the top!
Think about it this way – we all rush to lock in guys like Brandon Drury ($5.4K) because we see a cheap guy batting lead-off despite the underwhelming core metrics behind the player but we all go this route because of their spot in the batting order which only matters once a game. If Lucroy, Fletcher, Bourjos were batting 1-2-3 ahead of Trout/Bour wouldn’t this end up being a chalky stack? Just because they are batting 7-8-9 will make them owned at a fraction of what they would be in the other scenario with the same stacking potential ahead of Trout and Bour in the 2/3 holes.
MLB DFS – Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:
Please note this sample lineup is meant to be illustrative and should not be used as a Plug and Play lineup.
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P: Gerrit Cole
P: German Marquez
IF: Brandon Drury
IF: Jonathan Lucroy
IF: Justin Bour
OF: Mookie Betts
OF: J.D. Martinez
OF: Mike Trout
UTIL: Peter Bourjos
UTIL: David Fletcher
Slate Overview: Nobody wakes up today and thinks, man I cannot wait to stack Jonathan Lucroy and Peter Bourjos but hear me out. First and foremost, I think building around the top two K arms on this slate is the ideal build and Cole and Marquez become dual building blocks that give you top 5 raw point potential to build around on this slate.
Now, with the $7.6K per batter you have left you can certainly find more balanced stacks – the Blue Jays and Dodgers are both priced predominately in this range and can be perfect compliments to your stud arms.
The route I went here is a bit more extreme but this Stars/Scrubs approach is interesting. Assuming you get the big time performances you want from your arms, that puts you in a position where you have 50-60 fantasy points before your sticks even come into play.
As we saw on Opening Day, it took around 200 fantasy points to win a GPP so you need to grab a handful of bats with monster days – in fact the winning roster had 5 of their 8 bats go for 20+ fantasy points with HR’s from Luke Voit, Kris Bryant, Elvis Andrus and 2 HR games from Kolten Wong and Javier Baez.
So back to today – if you need big nights from 4-5 bats – I could argue the core of Mookie/JD/Trout/Bour has as much upside of any core 4 hitters on the slate. Conversely, its baseball and there is variance day-to-day so if Trout goes 1-4 with a single, the strategy backfires and your left wishing you rostered Kolten Wong type guys instead.
Assuming we can get the value we need to make it work today, I love the core 4 bats with the two stud arms. If we get Drury leading off again or guys like David Freese ($5.8K) getting the start in a R/L match-up in the heart of the Dodgers order, it becomes an intriguing way to go stars and scrubs so watch the lineups and react accordingly. My dude JuanBond broke down the top Value Plays across the DFS industry today in his Bargain Bin piece and there were guys like Jay Bruce and Michael Brantley he pointed out that make for great punts just over $6K with heart of the order spots and HR upside. If you opt to go with more one-off plays for value, these are some great guys to start with!
Next. MLB DFS - DraftKings Primer for Friday, March 29. dark
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