MLB DFS Picks and Pivots – Sunday, April 7 – It’s in the Cards!
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 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.
Saturday’s Early Slate MLB DFS action was all I had time to write-up yesterday due to family commitments and hopefully you were able to take some of those and build your bankroll as the New York Mets focus, paid off in a big time way. Steven Matz was the highest scoring pitcher on the entire slate while the Mets bats, at single digit ownership due to the popularity of Patrick Corbin, hit 5 HR’s against the Nationals including 2 from a less than 1% owned JD Davis. When combined with a 2 HR day from Jay Bruce and an HR from Rhys Hoskins, the early slate paid off nicely and set us up hopefully for a repeat Sunday!
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 – Sunday’s Pitching Breakdown:
We have 11 games on this Sunday MLB DFS slate full of sunny skies and missing the chalky Sunday Night Coors Field game which takes the path of least resistance out due to its lofty 11+ projected game total and leaves us with a slate full of games all in the 8.5-9 run range.
The pitching is loaded on this slate and any time we get a slate with multiple high K, ace level arms, I think your roster build needs to start with pitching and you simply branch out from there. Sure we have Max Scherzer and Jose Berrios at the top of this slate but with dangerous offenses in the Mets and Phillies opposing them, I would much rather take the savings down to Mike Clevinger ($19.5K) who gets perhaps the best match-up any arm could have this young season against the Toronto Blue Jays.
Over the last three games the Blue Jays are striking out over 13 times per game and on the season are averaging only 2.8 runs per game and with Clevinger coming off a dominant 12 K outing in his opening start versus the White Sox, he must be licking his chops to pad those stats against the Blue Jays.
Clevinger had an elite 29.3% K rate against RHB in 2018 and the Blue Jays projected lineup has 5 right-handed batters in the line-up with an overall team K rate of 24.1% against RHP in 2018. The Blue Jays have the second lowest implied run total on the slate and although I expect Clevinger to be popular, this is the kind of spot where you build around him as your SP1 in cash games and GPP’s and simply look to be different elsewhere.
Zach Eflin ($16.3K) is one of a handful of strong mid-tier options on this slate and honestly this price range is about as far as I would drop when looking for your SP2 as I think there is enough hitting value where there is no need to drop further and take on risk.
Eflin was phenomenal in his first outing of the season in Washington, going 5 innings and striking out 9 batters while walking only one. Eflin has always been an arm with strong home/road splits, interestingly enough pitching far better in Citizen’s Bank Park with an ERA a full run lower and a K rate 5 % higher than when on the road.
In 2018 those trends continued, Eflin had a 3.33 ERA and 3.77 xFIP at home with a 24% K rate – marks that were substantially better than his road splits while also generating less than 30% HC rates in the bandbox of his home park.
With Minnesota losing the DH here in Nelson Cruz, it takes a bit threat out of the heart of this Twins lineup and gives you a projected lineup with a 23% K rate against RHP since the start of 2018.
A Clevinger/Eflin duo on FantasyDraft leaves you with over $8K per batter for the rest of your lineup and I think when you dive into the hitting options here today, you will see how much value sits in that range to make this an easy build you can roll out in cash games and GPP’s.
MLB DFS – Building the Bats:
When looking at the hitting options today, my guess is the Yankees and Astros will be talked about a bunch as the only two teams with 5+ run totals, but if you take a step down, especially in this $8K price range on FantasyDraft, you will notice a slate that is loaded with talented hitters, giving us a nice balanced line-up build.
The St. Louis Cardinals will take on LHP Matt Strahm, a popular sleeper candidate and a highly owned DFS option his first time around who got rocked by Arizona to the tune of 8 runs in only 2 2/3 innings of work.
Although Strahm is talented, this Cardinals offense is loaded with bats that have strong metrics against lefties with 5 batters in the projected lineup with .200+ ISO marks against LHP in 2018 including Matt Carpenter, Paul Goldschmidt, Marcell Ozuna, Yadier Molina and Harrison Bader.
Strahm is a fly ball pitcher and in St. Louis today we have 70+ degree temperatures with 11 MPH winds blowing straight out, so balls that get in the air could easily end up over the fence with this powerful Cardinals line-up. As a two pitch pitcher, Strahm relies heavily on his fastball/slider, throwing them over 80% of the time in his first start and up and down this line-up, you see batters who profile well against those pitch types.
Against the slider specifically, a pitch Strahm threw over 30% of the time against Arizona and around the same mark in 2018 – look at some of these metrics:
- Goldschmidt – 65% HC rate
- Molina/Bader – .486 and .350 ISO marks
- DeJong – 401 average distance
If Strahm has to rely on his fastball, as he did over 50% of the time in 2018 – well, it doesn’t get better:
- Ozuna – .375 ISO and 60% HC rate
- DeJong – only an 18% GB rate with a .300+ ISO which correlates nicely with Strahm’s FB tendencies
The nice part about this stack is outside of Goldschmidt ($9.3K), every other batter here is cheap – Carpenter at $8.1K, Ozuna ($7.2K), Bader ($7.6K), Molina ($6.7K) and DeJong ($7.3K) – making this a powerful stack for a price point that works perfectly alongside some of the pricier arms.
MLB DFS – Sample Lineup and Slate Overview:
Please note – this sample lineup is meant to be illustrative only and should not be used as a plug and play lineup.
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P: Mike Clevinger
P: Zach Eflin
IF: Paul Goldschmidt
IF: Matt Carpenter
IF: Yadier Molina
OF: Marcell Ozuna
OF: Harrison Bader
OF: Bryce Harper
UTIL: Paul DeJong
UTIL: Michael Conforto
Slate Overview: With the context that I want to pay up for pitching today, the pricing on the Yankees and Astros stacks leave them a bit too high for this roster build but the Cardinals with a mid-range 4.5 IRT today give you some serious upside for a stack that I feel will go over-looked. With warm temperatures and the wind blowing straight out, if Strahm struggles again like he did against Arizona, this Cardinals lineup has the ability to make him pay and while you may not need to go with a full 6 man stack, the fact that you can while still plugging in some power one-offs makes this an intriguing Sunday build. Good luck all!
Next. MLB DFS Pitching Primer - Sunday, April 7. dark
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