Friday has a split slate: There are five games in the 1:05 pm ET early slate and 10 games in the 7:05 pm ET main slate. Let’s jump in.
Pitchers
Studs
Max Scherzer is certainly in a tier of his own today, at least from a pricing standpoint: At $13,000 on DraftKings and $10,300 on FanDuel, he’s a whopping $4,100 and $1,700 more expensive than any other pitcher today. He has the lowest opponent implied run total by quite a bit . . .
. . . although his current -171 moneyline is a little lower than it normally would be because of his matchup against solid righty Vincent Velasquez. Further, as I’ve mentioned in several breakdowns at this point, rosters are different in 2017 than they were in 2016. If you look at team wOBA from the 2016 season, you’ll see that the Phillies rank dead last at .296. But then if you look in our Player Models you’ll see that Scherzer has an opposing wOBA mark of .312 for today. Why? Our models adjust for an opposing team’s wOBA on a player-by-player basis. Guys like Michael Saunders and Howie Kendrick aren’t superstars, but they’re solid and help the overall offense. Having guys who simply aren’t easy outs can make a huge difference, so the Phillies this year probably aren’t as bad as they were last year.
Getting back to Scherzer: He’s always in play regardless of matchup. While his $13,000 DraftKings salary seems like a lot, it’s not for him. Over the last four years, Scherzer has been $13,000 or more a whopping 34 times. In those games, he has averaged 26.32 DraftKings points and a +3.41 Plus/Minus:
If we add his opponent implied run total and moneyline range to the trends, his production dips to 23.76 DraftKings points per game over six contests, but his average is pulled down by one poor outing against the Reds back in 2015:
Overall, Scherzer has been valuable even at high price tags.
For more on Scherzer, see Matthew Freedman’s Three Key MLB Players for today.
Values
Given the positional scarcity — Scherzer is the only stud — he should be massively owned. The tricky slate is certainly the main one, as Scherzer plays during the day, and there aren’t a whole lot of great options at night. If you sort by past-year WHIP in our Models, you’ll see a whole lot of red:
If you want to emphasize Vegas data to try to find (relative) safety, there are only two pitchers in the slate on teams with moneyline odds of at least -160 and opponent implied run totals of less than 4.0: Mike Fiers and Mike Leake. They aren’t strikeout guys — they have low K Predictions of 5.3 and 4.2 — and they don’t have great Statcast data either: Fiers, for example, allowed a 35 percent hard hit rate last season. This is what ‘safety’ buys you tonight.
In terms of upside, Francisco Liriano has the highest Park Factor (along with Matt Andriese) at 89 in Tampa, and he also boasts the slate’s highest K Prediction at 7.2. He has an awful past-year WHIP of 1.531, but, again, every pitcher in this slate has issues. If it makes you feel better, guys in Liriano’s K Prediction range have done pretty well historically in pitcher-friendly parks:
Fastballs
Vincent Velasquez: He has the second-highest K Prediction of the day (7.3) behind Scherzer; in four home games last year with a K Prediction between 7 and 8, he averaged 26.14 DraftKings points and a +11.04 Plus/Minus.
Ivan Nova: Among pitchers who played at least 20 games last year, he ranks third on the day in batted ball distance allowed at just 198 feet; he faces a Braves team implied for only 3.7 runs, and he’s currently pulling in 79 percent of the moneyline bets.
Notable Stacks
With our Lineup Builder, it’s easy to incorporate stacks into DFS rosters. Today is the first Coors slate of the year, and the Dodgers-Rockies game predictably dominates the slate with a Vegas total of 12 runs — two more than that of any other team (per our Vegas Dashboard):
If you peruse our DFS Ownership Dashboard — which can help you focus on sharp plays — you’ll see that there have been a lot of highly-owned batters this week. Take last night’s ownership data, for example:
Batters like George Springer, Jose Altuve, Buster Posey, and Carlos Correa are all talented and have massive upside on a slate-to-slate basis, but rostering any batter at 50-plus percent is questionable given the event-based nature of MLB and the fact that sample sizes are small. In the NBA, teams get 90-100 possessions per game; in MLB, batters get four or five bats to score fantasy points. Rostering Correa was a sharp move yesterday given the Astros’ matchup, but you can see the downside: Even the best batters in the world often score few fantasy points. We’re seeing sky-high ownership levels early this season, and there’s a unique opportunity to take advantage of that.
Here’s why I bring that up: If the top batters on some teams have experienced ownership of 50-plus percent so far, how high do you think the ownership will be for the Coors Field guys today?
As you probably expect, the 10 highest-rated five-man DraftKings stacks in the Bales Model for the early slate belong to the Dodgers and Rockies. Here’s the top one, which could be slightly less common than a straight 1-2-3-4-5 stack, but probably not by much:
Because of the massive total and likely high ownership of these projected lineups, you’ll have to take a stance on this game. Are you going to be under- or overweight? Guaranteed prize pools (GPPs) will be won or lost in the extremes today.
For the 10-game main slate let’s switch to FanDuel, where we find a 1-2-5-6 Cleveland stack as the Bales Model’s top-rated group:
This isn’t a surprise. Cleveland’s implied run total of 5.5 runs is 0.4 runs higher than that of any other team in the main slate. The Indians are at hitter-friendly Chase Field tonight and will face off against Arizona righty Shelby Miller, who owns the slate’s second-worst WHIP (1.746) as well as an awful past-year 92 MPH exit velocity allowed. Carlos Santana, projected to bat leadoff for Cleveland, has sizable splits against righties with a .380 wOBA and .279 ISO over the last year. It is a small sample, but these guys have been crushing the baseball this season:
Batters
If you want to get off the Dodgers and Rockies in the early slate, the Tigers might be a good place to look. They own the slate’s highest non-Coors stack and are currently implied for 4.4 runs — the highest mark in the early slate outside of the Coors game. And they certainly have a lot of upside as well: Four of their top-six batters have ISO marks above .200 against right-handed pitchers, headlined by Miguel Cabrera (.261) and Nick Castellanos (.216). The ‘Miggy day game narrative’ is probably overblown compared to the actual data backing it up . . .
. . . but he also likely won’t have his usual ownership because of the Coors game.
On the other side of that game, Mitch Moreland is batting cleanup for the Red Sox and is one of seven of nine lefty or switch hitters in Boston’s lineup against righty Michael Fulmer. The Red Sox should be quite contrarian given the Coors guys and even the Tigers, but Moreland has shown glimpses of upside. Despite scoring exactly zero DraftKings points over the first three games of the season, he’s been making good contact early on, as evidenced by his 100 MPH exit velocity and 267-foot batted ball distance. For those reasons, his Recent Batted Ball Luck (Recent BBL) sits at 99. Here’s a definition of that new statistic:
The difference between a player’s percentile rank in batted ball distance and fantasy scoring over the past 15 days
Moreland has been hitting it well, and it hasn’t turned into fantasy production. It could today. Also, for reference, Miggy is first among all batters with a 100 Recent BBL mark.
Kyle Schwarber is especially cheap on FanDuel, where his $3,400 salary comes with a 99 percent Bargain Rating. He’s projected to bat leadoff for the Cubs, who are currently implied for 5.1 runs against the Brewers’ Jimmy Nelson, who owns an awful past-year WHIP of 1.579. Schwarber finally got ahold of one last night, and on the season he’s averaging a ridiculous 100 MPH exit velocity on his batted balls along with a 50 percent hard hit rate. He has a .409 wOBA over the past year against righties, and his early Statcast data suggests he’s due for even more big games in the future.
Good luck, and be sure to do your own research with the Labs Tools!
News Updates
After this piece is published, FantasyLabs is likely to provide news updates on a number of players herein mentioned. Be sure to stay ahead of your competition with our industry-leading DFS-focused news blurbs:
