Monday has a nine-game main slate at 7:05 pm ET. Let’s jump in.
Pitchers
Studs
Among the five highest-priced FanDuel pitchers today, there’s a clear line between the two top pitchers and the rest:
John Lackey is $200 less than Danny Salazar on FanDuel and $100 less on DraftKings at $10,200. And, given the data in our Player Models, he seems like the clear-cut preferable option: He’s facing the Brewers, who are currently implied for just 3.1 runs, while Salazar faces the Twins, implied for 3.9 runs. Also, Lackey has been the better pitcher through two games, allowing four runs and striking out 17 batters in 12 innings against two tough teams:
Lackey’s matchup against the Brewers in intriguing. Even though Milwaukee has a slate-low implied total, the Brewers have excellent batting marks this season, evidenced by their MLB-high team ISO of .225. They also rank second on the season in strikeout rate at 27.6 percent, which shows the extreme upside Lackey has in the matchup even though the Brewers have some positive indicators. There are three pitchers with high K Predictions today . . .
. . . and Lackey’s 8.5 mark is second in the slate. There haven’t been many pitchers historically with opponent run totals as low and K Predictions as high as Lackey’s. Per our Trends tool, these pitchers have done well, as expected:
Of course, Lackey will likely have high ownership, which Pro Subscribers can review in our DFS Ownership Dashboard shortly after lineups lock.
Although he might not be the better option in cash games, Salazar is a great pivot in guaranteed prize pools, since he offers upside comparable to Lackey’s at a likely ownership discount. Sure, he carries some risk, given the Twins’ run implication of 3.9, but in GPPs you aren’t worried about safety. It’s all about upside.
Salazar went for 27.3 DraftKings points against the White Sox in his last start, giving up just four hits and striking out 11 batters across six innings. He’s gone for 30-plus DraftKings points 10 times over the last couple of years, and he always has the capability of getting double-digit strikeouts when he takes the mound. Despite those massive games, prior to today he’s had an 8.0-plus K Prediction just four times; in those instances, he hit value in three games. His advanced metrics are a little better than his typical averages: Over the first two games this year, he’s allowed a low hard hit rate of just 25 percent, good for a decrease of eight percentage points in comparison to his 12-month average. Further, he’s allowed a fly ball rate of just 29 percent through two games. Even though Salazar’s not getting the Vegas love that Lackey is, his batted ball numbers suggest that the two are close.
Values
Robbie Ray could be classified as a high-priced ‘stud’ with Lackey and Salazar on DraftKings due to his elevated $9,800 price tag. He’s much cheaper on FanDuel, where his low $8,000 price tag comes with a 95 percent Bargain Rating. He doesn’t boast the best matchup in the world: He’s facing the Dodgers, who own the slate’s third-highest past-year wOBA at .313 and played well against another Arizona lefty on Saturday, getting nine hits and three earned runs against Patrick Corbin. That said, Ray is in excellent form, throwing a gem of a game last outing against the Giants:
Further, it’s impossible to ignore his massive, slate-high K Prediction of 8.8, especially given his low FanDuel salary. According to our Trends tool, there have been 24,367 pitcher starts over the last four seasons. In that absolutely massive sample, only 207 pitchers (0.85 percent) have had K Predictions that high. And of those pitchers only 33 of them (0.14 percent) have had FanDuel salaries as low as Ray’s. This is a rare situation, which (along with his high Bargain Rating) suggests that he’s massively underpriced on FanDuel. Also, the cohort of 33 similar pitchers performed pretty well:
Intriguingly, 14 of those 33 pitchers have been underdogs, as Ray is today. They’ve done well too:
One issue with Ray, however, is that he’s opposed by Brandon McCarthy, who is in a pretty darn good spot himself, and he’s even cheaper on FanDuel at $7,000. McCarthy has been very solid to start the year, averaging a +12.53 FanDuel Plus/Minus through two games.
So far, he’s allowed just eight total hits and two earned runs across 12 innings. He’s struck out only eight batters, but he has some K upside against a Diamondbacks team that ranks third in strikeout rate in 2017, whiffing on 24.6 percent of their at-bats. McCarthy has a nice 7.5 K Prediction, and Arizona’s 3.4-run total is the second-lowest mark in the slate. Ray is in a rare spot, but so is McCarthy: Only 172 pitchers have had a K Prediction of 7.5-plus at $7,000 or less.
And only 30 of those have had Vegas data as positive as McCarthy’s:
Tournaments should be fun tonight.
Fore more on McCarthy, see today’s Three Key MLB Players.
Fastball
Jharel Cotton: He went for 49.0 FanDuel points last start, allowing two hits and zero runs across seven innings while striking out six; he has a nice 6.5 K Prediction today against the Rangers, and (like McCarthy) he’s just $7,000.
Notable Stacks
With our Lineup Builder, it’s easy to incorporate stacks into DFS rosters. Let’s do a five-man stack on DraftKings using the Bales Model player ratings as a guide, and then we’ll do the same for a four-man FanDuel stack.
The highest-rated five-man DraftKings stack in the Bales Model belongs to the Houston Astros:
The Astros should be popular — they’re tied with the Braves for the slate’s highest implied run total at 4.8 — but this stack could actually be somewhat contrarian, as it skips over projected No. 3 and No. 5 hitters Jose Altuve and Carlos Beltran (via our Lineups page). The likely reason for their omission is their past-year ISOs against righties (.184 and .188) and also their expense: Altuve is the highest-priced Astro at $5,100. Evan Gattis and Alex Bregman lead the team with past-year ISO marks of .255 and .190 against RHP.
On FanDuel, the top-rated four-man stack also belongs to the Astros. And so does No. 2 stack. The third-highest stack, however, goes to the Oakland Athletics:
This is an incredibly cheap stack with a combined $10,500 salary, evidenced by the team’s slate-high Team Value Rating (TVR) on FanDuel at 87 (per our Vegas Dashboard):
TVR is defined as thus:
A 0 to 100 grade showing a team’s historical value based on their live implied runs and collective salaries on a given DFS site
Given their run implication of 4.6 and collective salaries, the A’s currently offer the best value in the slate.
Batters
As usual, let’s talk about our new Recent Batted Ball Luck metric. Here’s the definition:
The difference between a player’s percentile rank in batted ball distance and fantasy scoring over the past 15 days
I like to make Player Models for the sole purpose of finding undervalued stacks. You can always generate stacks using a Pro Model — that’s exactly what I did above — but you can also build models that are weighted toward particular batted ball metrics. For example, you can make a model that gives all 100 rating points to Recent Batted Ball Luck and then generate a stack based on that model’s rating (only RBBL). Here’s such a stack:
Using that metric, the ‘unluckiest’ projected foursome today is a group of White Sox: Tim Anderson, Melky Cabrera, Matt Davidson, and Jacob May. Of course, you may not want to use guys lower in the order like Davidson and May, and you may want to find a reversion-likely team that still has solid Vegas data — the White Sox are currently implied for just 3.9 runs against Yankees lefty Jordan Montgomery — but can easily adjust your models to account for that: You can make lineup order and Vegas data worth any number of ratings points and combine those with RBBL.
Let’s hit on one more batter before we leave. Freddie Freeman is projected to hit third for the Braves, who again are implied for a slate-high 4.8 runs. They’ll go up against Padres righty Jered Weaver, who has a poor past-year WHIP of 1.448 and ranks fourth among all pitchers today with 2.001 past-year HR/9 allowed. He’s given up four homers in his first two starts of the year and has allowed an average batted ball distance of 214 feet over that time. The last game was at Coors Field, but Freeman can definitely go yard in any park: He has a high .298 ISO against RHP over the last year. Over the last two seasons, he has averaged 16.69 FanDuel points and has hit his “Upside” mark 24 percent of the time when the Braves have been implied for 4.5-plus runs.
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:
