Daily Fantasy Baseball Advice – 8/4/2016
Welcome to Thursday baseball. Can you smell the weekend? Lets torch our productivity at work for a few more days with some daily fantasy baseball. It’s definitely a strange day and we are writing this late. But vegas says everyone is going to hit dingers so we need to take a no BS look at the players and see where they might be wrong.
Pitching
Drew Pomeranz is probably going to be a favorite tonight with his low 1.14 WHIP, strong 10SO/9 upside, and lowest allowed wOBA, AVG, SLG, and OPS on the day. The park helps too. We feel Pomeranz will show up on most radars today so the excitement level for GPP’s is not as strong. But considering today’s options, he may be your best bet for both formats if you aren’t in a contrarian mood.
J.A. Happ is probably also going to get some looks from the public today but at a matchup level with HOU and considering his slightly lower price, the dirt looks a little cleaner. His WHIP is 1.16, his allowed stats are very close to Pomeranz, but just from a DFS perspective he is a bit more dense when it comes to points per $1k at almost 4. This is indicative of his recent success… and so the question is, can he keep it up? The xFIP gap is leaning regression. But there are a few TOR players that stand out so strongly against Fiers that I feel the W is more likely here. Others may disagree, but we see him as higher risk/higher reward. Just what I’m looking for.
Kenta Maeda, as silly as it sounds to take on COL in Coors (and trust us it is definitely silly) dont be surprised to see his Fanduel and Draftkings ownership a bit higher than you expect. His regular season allowed stats are a virtual tie with Pomeranz and he is indicating a higher SO/9 upside than Happ. The public should spot this and we suspect the growing base of intelligent DFSers will all be thinking "Muahaha, no-one will suspect it!"…. This is spiraling down into triple-reverse-psychology quickly. So let’s keep it simple. Do you want to have a beer on Thirsty Thursday and root for your pitcher at coors field? I say do it, if only for a buck. The risk is too high to go heavy, but life is too short not to play.
Stacking
With so much bad pitching out there, the interwebs and twitter quickly filled up with hot talk of poor Finnegan getting crushed by STL. Well… the St Louis dead-birds put up a fat zero today and Finny pitched a shutout. Again, the name of the game is deciphering when someone is close to regressing to their mean. Staring at hard data wont always do the trick. But if you watched Finnegan get thrust into a world series game his rookie year …. and watched him pull it off… you would know that he’s got the goods and the wherewithal to bounce back. We did not make some crystal-ball call on finny today, but if there is ever a theme: It pays to bet against when a lot of fish will be exposed.
And now to talk from the other side of our mouth…
LAD will, no doubt, be up way up there in ownership. But Coors park factors are such outliers that it must be contended with. This is just DFS canon in 2016. Chatwood is giving up wOBA in the .360s to lefties and the addition of Reddick is appealing. Try to slink by with a few of the lower expected owned players from LAD as well as small exposure to a few full LAD stacks in the optimizer tonight.
TOR is interesting especially if Bautista gets a rally started against Fiers. He is batting wOBA in the .350s and Fiers is giving up the same to right handers. At a grainular level, Bautista is killing junkballs and we feel his numbers are still trending up. The park is favorable and TOR platoon has an above average matchup against Fiers as well. Bautista, although he can’t defend against a right hook (or was it a left?), will be getting a few stack locks in our mlb lineup optimizer tonight.
And since we are so late on today’s article, here are our personal double stack iterations tonight, sans much explanation:
LAD, TOR, TEX (Beltran), and LAA (Trout)
Good luck tonight!