Beat The Streak Pick - May 12th
Joining a $20,000 Beat the Streak like Survivor Contest
Splash Sports Survivor Contest
This is not a paid endorsement, unfortunately, amirite?? But John Laghezza got me into this Beat the Streak survivor contest.
If you’re into betting baseball, you should be on his Substack here:
He puts out a daily podcast talking about each game, it’s really entertaining even if you’re not grinding bets every day.
It’s pretty simple. Pick a hitter to get a hit each day, if they get a hit, you move on. Last man standing gets $25,000. You can join the contest with me here. If you miss it, I believe they start a new one every Tuesday.
This iteration of the contest starts today. And I’m giving it a go. They make it easy on day one. We pick two players (and one alternate in case our guy isn’t in the lineup) and just need one of them to advance.
To advance on Day 1, either or both of your primary players must record a hit.
I doubt I’m going to win this thing. But we can use some of the MLB DW data to at least give ourselves an edge on people just clicking names based on what comes up on the screen.
So we have a new tab on the MLB DW Daily Matchups Cheat Sheet, which is available for paid subs.
Let’s walk through that. Here’s what it looks like:
The columns:
MLB DW H: My hits projection for the player today
Book Price: The DraftKings price for over 0.5 hits
Matchups Model Data
PC: The pitches seen 2025-2026 against pitchers most similar to the guy they’re facing today
SwStr%: The SwStr% against those similar pitches
Hard%: Hard hit rate against those similar pitches
xwOBA: xwOBA against those similar pitches
AVG: AVG against those similar pitches
BIP%: BIP% against those similar pitches
All three categories of things there can help us in picking guys for hits. We want a high projection, of course.
We can back our picks up by comparing to what the betting line is saying. You could probably do just fine using that alone. The book lines have a ton of information in them. Although you do have to beware of the fact that lines are made to target the bettor, not really the matchup. But it works well.
And the matchups model is something we’ll rely on. I threw BIP% in there because it’s pretty important. We want to avoid hitters with high walk rate projections here. A walk is as good as an out when we need a base knock.
So we can throw some filters on it to get our options for the day:
→ Hit Projection > 1.1
→ Book Price below -250
→ Matchup SwStr% below 7%
Today, that gives us this:
I think we’ll see a lot of the same names every day. And we can’t re-use guys, so we have to be a little careful about that. If we’re ten days into it, we’ll probably have to open up the filters a little bit. But the key for today is just to move on and see what percentage of the field is leftover for tomorrow.
For me, it’s going to be Yandy Diaz against Patrick Corbin. He’s 8th in the league in hits going back to 2024. He doesn’t walk much (8.4% since 2024), and Corbin is typically throwing pretty hittable strikes. Great spot for Yandy to get a base knock.
But we have to pick TWO guys today. We’ll take Nico Hoerner as our backup and Xavier Edwards as the third guy. We can only lose one guy today for future picks, even though we’re picking three. So if Yandy gets a hit, we get to re-use Hoerner and Edwards later.
I’m locked in for day one!
