MLB DFS Pitching Primer: Friday, 6/14 – The Cream of the Crop

MLB DFS Pitching Primer:

Welcome back to the Friday edition of the MLB DFS Pitching Primer! I’m Thunder Dan and I’ll be covering pitching for MLB DFS on all season long at FantasyCPR. I’m including both FanDuel and DraftKings pricing and will be covering my favorite pitching options for both sites.

After a much needed day off yesterday, I’m back for tonight’s 15-game main slate on FanDuel and DraftKings. I didn’t play much yesterday, and that ended up being a good thing because some of the pitchers I liked busted and my lineups didn’t do all that well.

"The goal of the pitching primer is to help you narrow down your pitching options for both your GPPs and cash games. Analyzing pitchers and pitching matchups is something I really enjoy and I hope to give you a detailed analysis of why I think each pitcher makes for a compelling cash or GPP play."

I felt compelled to write up today’s slate after seeing the number of high-end options that there at pitcher today. It might be the best collection of aces we’ve had on a slate since opening day.

Every day is a new day and in DFS, and we are presented with a new challenge – to try to find the right combination of pitchers and hitters to get that winning score. I look at it like trying to solve a Sudoku puzzle or a Rubix cube. Let’s start, as we always do, by examining the starting pitching matchups for all 8 games.

MLB DFS Pitching Primer: First Look

Here are tonight’s pitching match-ups. The home pitcher is listed second and the Vegas odds are listed in parenthesis when available. Remember that some pitchers have extremely large home/road splits.

Vegas lines and implied run totals can be tricky to navigate at times and they do change throughout the day, but they are certainly a great place to start your MLB DFS research. For cash games, I am often looking for large home favorites, while anything goes for GPPs.

Robbie Ray vs. Max Scherzer (-200)

Eduardo Rodriguez (-165) vs. Jimmy Yacabonis 

Adam Plutko (-130) vs. Ryan Carpenter

Andrew Heaney vs. Blake Snell (-180)

Steven Brault vs. Trevor Richards (-110)

Daniel Ponce de Leon vs. Steven Matz (-125)

Jesse Chavez vs. Tyler Mahle

Nick Pivetta vs. Max Fried (-140)

Brad Keller vs. Kyle Gibson (-205)

CC Sabathia vs. Lucas Giolito (-110)

Aaron Sanchez vs. Gerrit Cole (-270)

Cal Quantrill vs. Jeff Hoffman (-110)

Marco Gonzales vs. Chris Bassitt (-180)

Kyle Hendricks vs. Rich Hill (-135)

Zach Davies vs. Drew Pomeranz

With 30 pitchers on tonight’s slate, you could make a compelling case for at least 8-10 of them for DFS purposes. However, I have just five pitchers that I am going to recommend today for your cash and GPP contests. Let’s start at the top with the aces and my favorite for cash games.

MLB DFS Pitching Primer: Cash Game Ace

This decision was a really tough one to make because I really like all three of these top-priced pitchers tonight and I really wouldn’t fault anyone for playing any of them in cash. Having said that, there is one guy who I think is the safest of the three.

Gerrit Cole (12k FD, 11.9k DK) vs. Toronto

Cole comes into this game in great form, fresh off a 14-strikeout performance against another AL East team, the Baltimore Orioles. He’s the largest home favorite on the slate at -270 and facing a young Blue Jays lineup that sports a 25% K rate this season. He’s priced as the SP1 on both sites, but for good reason as he’s simply been dominant this year and has the softest match up of any of the aces on the slate.

How good has Cole been? He has the most strikeouts in the majors this season with 130 in 84 innings pitched. That’s good for 13.8/9 innings which is up a full 1.4 from last season. When you translate that to strikeout percentage it’s a 38% whiff rate and it’s over 41% to lefties.

Toronto happens to be on a hot streak right now, scoring 20 runs in their last two games. But they were feasting on some bad Baltimore pitching and Cole is about to cut through this lineup like a hot knife through butter. He throws a hard high 80’s slider, which we know by now is the pitch that we look for when targeting Toronto.

MLB DFS Pitching Primer: GPP Ace #1

Max Scherzer (11.6k FD, 11.5k DK) vs. Arizona

Mad Max will look to keep his momentum going as he faces a dangerous D-Backs team at home. He’s a solid -200 favorite at home against a team that carries a 23% K rate.

There are dangerous lefties in this lineup that Max will have to be careful with (Peralta, Marte, Escobar), but I should also point out that Max has been effective at whiffing lefties with a 27% K rate with an elite 38% to righties.

Scherzer comes into this game riding a hot streak of his own, having gone 2-0 with 24 strikeouts in his last two starts spanning 15 innings. He started the season with a few sub-par outings, but his overall numbers by this point in the season reflect that he is still one of the best pitchers in the game.

He has a walk rate of only 5% which is huge because he’s keeping guys off the bases and giving up fewer runs when he does surrender the occasional long ball (homers to lefties has been his Achilles heel for years).

I always like to factor in the opposing pitcher for another 1-2 strikeouts when we have an elite strikeout pitcher against an NL team, which could give Scherzer an advantage over the other two AL aces tonight.

MLB DFS Pitching Primer: GPP Ace #2

Lucas Giolito (11.4k FD, 11.1k DK) vs. New York Yankees

At the beginning of the year, do you think even Lucas Giolito thought he would be mentioned in the same conversation with Max Scherzer and Gerrit Cole?

Giolito has arrived in a big way and has been nothing short of spectacular this season so far for the White Sox. He is a former Nats prospect who was dealt to Chicago for Adam Eaton back in 2017 after struggling in his first season with Washington.

He pitched well in a small sample size in 2017 for Chicago before posting an ERA over 6.00 for the White Sox last year.

This year, Giolito has figured it out. He has harnessed his talent and is putting together one of the best runs we’ve seen from a young pitcher in some time and reminding everyone why he was once the top pitching prospect in all of baseball.

To think that he was only 5.3k on Draftkings for his first start of the season against the Royals is pretty wild and shows you just how far he’s come in the 11 starts since then.

Anyway, tonight he faces the Yankees at home in a tough matchup for any pitcher. But, he has proven that he can excel in tough matchups this season already, pitching a CGSO against Houston last month. He’s just locked in right now, posting between 33 and 43 DK points over his last four games and I’m confident he will be lower owned than the two more well-known aces Scherzer and Cole due to the matchup and sticker shock over his price.

MLB DFS Pitching Primer: GPP Pivot

Andrew Heaney (8.9k FD, 8.8k DK) @ Tampa Bay

Point-per-dollar Heaney is my favorite play on the entire slate. He’s making his fourth start of the season and I think I’ve suggested using him 4/4 times now. He has elite strikeout numbers this year, posting a 41% K rate and a 19% swinging strike rate, the latter of which can only be matched by his mound opponent tonight, Blake Snell.

Heaney’s ERA is a bit inflated at 5.40 and he’s been victimized by the long ball, giving up 6 dingers already. But he’s due for some regression there as his 29% HR/FB ratio is well above his career average and he’s got a positive park factor working in his favor tonight as he takes the hill in pitcher-friendly Tropicana Field.

This is an elite spot for Heaney as Tampa Bay is a team that I’ve been targeting with left-handed pitchers for the last month. They’re striking out at a crazy percentage against lefties this year with a league-worst 28% whiff rate vs. LHP.

Heaney is an elite strikeout pitcher vs. a team with contact issues against his handedness in a good park for pitchers. And he’s underpriced for his upside compared to the aces we’ve already covered.

MLB DFS Pitching Primer: Cheap Arm/SP2

Daniel Ponce de Leon (7.7k FD, 8.4k DK) @ New York Mets

We get the return of “the explorer” tonight as Ponce de Leon will make his second start of the season against the Mets (sorry, I am a social studies teacher and I required to make history jokes – it’s in my contract). He may actually found the fountain of youth as he’s 27 years old but still a rookie making only his sixth major league start.

D.P.L. made one start back in April against the Brewers and was effective, going five innings and striking out 7 while allowing only one run. His AAA numbers aren’t going to wow you but we have seen him pitch well in the majors before as he made four starts for St. Louis last season and worked another 7 in relief, compiling a 2.73 ERA and striking out nearly a batter per inning.

The Mets are implied for about 4.5 runs and have middling offensive numbers. There are power threats in the middle of that order in Pete Alonso and Michael Conforto, but also some swing and miss guys like Carlos Gomez and Todd Frazier. I’m really attracted to his price on FanDuel as there just aren’t many decent arms before 8k on this slate. On DK, I’ll probably just find an extra 400 bucks to get up to Heaney.

MLB DFS Pitching Primer: Gas Can of the Night

Shelby Miller/Drew Smyly/Texas Bullpen @ Cincinnati

The Rangers are so starved for starting pitching that they are going with an opener (Jesse Chavez) to start Friday night’s game against the Reds. The top two candidates to follow Chavez are Shelby Miller and Drew Smyly, both gas cans that we can target with Reds hitters.

Miller had been relegated to long relief after failing horribly as a starter earlier this year but has still been getting lit up in that role, too. Among pitchers who have thrown at least 35 innings this year, he has the second worst xFIP in all of baseball behind only the corpse of Dan Straily at 6.65 and his ERA is sitting only a half run below 10.

Smyly has also been demoted to working in relief and has been arguably as bad or worse than Miller with an ERA over 8, xFIP over 6 and 3 HR/9.

The bottom line is that the Reds are going to see some of the worst pitchers in baseball this season in one of the best parks for hitting, the Great American Ballpark. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we see 4-5 home runs hit in Cincy tonight.

MLB DFS Pitching: Rankings and Review

This is where I give you my final rankings for both cash games and GPPs. Remember, rankings for cash are based on safety, while rankings for GPP are based on their ceiling and point-per-dollar upside.

Remember on DK, I prefer to pay up for at least one high-priced pitcher in cash and on FanDuel I prefer to pay up in cash more often than not. Today that is NOT the case, and I’m taking a different approach to my cash and GPP roster builds.

On DK, my preferred cash game pairing is going to be Cole-Heaney (yes, that’s a lot of salary, I know!), while my favorite GPP pairing is going to be Giolito-Heaney because I think Giolito will be the lowest owned of the big three. If it’s a decision between paying up for arms or paying up for Coors bats, I am landing firmly in the “pay up for pitching” camp tonight.

If you play mainly on FanDuel try not to spread your ownership out too much among different pitchers guys, otherwise, you are probably hurting your chances at winning a GPP by getting the right stack with the right pitcher.

Cash Rankings

1. Cole
2. Scherzer
3. Giolito
4. Heaney
5. Ponce de Leon

GPP Rankings

1. Heaney
2. Giolito
3. Scherzer
4. Cole
5. Robbie Ray (not featured)

Thanks for reading the MLB DFS Pitching Primer and be sure to come back for more great FantasyCPR content for MLB and all other sports! Good luck