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My weekend of galavanting around with fantasy football stuff is done, and we’re locked into to the stretch run of the MLB season, starting tonight on this Monday slate.
It’s a goofy 7:40pm start time for a seven-game slate that features a bunch of West Coast action. We have games in Arizona, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Seattle, and San Diego. So lock is later than usual, and you’ll have to stay up real late to know how it turned out.
Weather
A bunch of west coast games means we shouldn’t have rain issues. I hardly see a drop of precipitation in the forecasts across the board, so we’re all clear here to get this started off clean.
Game Info
Spot 1: Twins vs. Jeffrey Springs
6.35 implied runs, +1.85 over average. Jeffrey Springs has had major issues at home. He has a 6.46 ERA, a 1.60 WHIP, and a 2.5 HR/9. I don’t know if the Athletics knew that they’d be playing three seasons in Sacramento when they acquired this guy, but if they did, that makes absolutely no sense. Springs is one of the league’s highest fly ball rate pitchers, and this park laps the field in allowing homers.
So it hasn’t been good for Springs. He’s been half decent against lefties, but is in the pits against righties. The Twins project to put eight righties in the lineup, so it’s all systems go for them. I’m fully buying the chalk here. Plenty of rally killers coming.
If you want to put the contrarian angle on it, you could say that home runs are better for one-off plays rather than full five-man stacks. The way to hit on a five-man stack as a whole is to put together a bunch of hits in a row. Of course, a bunch of home runs in a row is better than any other kind of hit, but the Twins could get 3-4 homers and still not be the top-scoring stack. We have some nice prices on the Twins as well:
Keaschall $4,300
Buxton $6,000
Jeffers $5,000
Bell $4,500
Lewis $4,900
Clemens (LHB) $5,400
Lee $4,200
Culpepper $3,300
Kreidler $3,200
They are higher priced than usual, but you don’t have to pay $5k per play to stack the Twinkies tonight. You should prefer the fly ball hitters if picking between guys. The biggest FB% hitters:
Buxton 33%
Clemens 33%
Keaschall 29%
Jeffers 29%
Lee 29%
Maybe that’s the proper five-man stack if you’re choosing.
Spot 2: Cubs vs. Merrill Kelly
19 runs last night. The Cubs are a buzzsaw. They’re 4th in the league in homers and they have a lot of guys swinging it well all at the same time right now. You should be able to get some lower ownership on them against one of the league’s most hittable pitchers in Kelly. It’s in Arizona, which might hurt the Cubs slightly, but it’s not a horrible park for hitting by any means.
The D’Backs bullpen profiles really well tonight, being #3 on the bullpen board tonight. But if the Cubs take it to Kelly like they did to Miller last night, they get to see the bad arms in that bullpen.
They are more expensive than the Twins:
PCA $6,600
Suzuki $5,300
Busch $4,600
Bregman $5,600
Happ $4,300
Hoerner $4,700
Ramirez $3,800
Conforto $3,300
Amaya $2,700
The one-offs are tough to pick up, but the full stack makes sense. It’s kind of the inverse of the Twins thing.
I think you could do a four-man Cubs with 2-3 plays from the Twins and feel pretty great about that. It would require paying way down at pitcher, but we’ll get to those options later.
Spot 3: Guardians vs. George Klassen
Hold the phone! Klassen is good now, isn’t he? We’ll talk about him. But he’s pitched great in his last two and has turned the walk rate thing around in this recent sample. It’s a small sample, and it could all go south. But Klassen’s slider is wicked, and the Guardians implied total here makes no sense to me. So this is an avoid to me.
But I might be biased in favor of Klassen just because we were on him early and it looks to have been the right lean.
Spot 4: Reds vs. Whisenhunt
How I know that I don’t have the absolute perfect projection model is that it sometimes it picks out a player to hate to a level that doesn’t really make sense statistically. That’s the case with how the model feels about Whisenhunt.
I have the Reds projecting #2 in fantasy points behind the Twins, and not far behind.
Whisenhunt has a 15% K%, a 13% BB%, and a .379 xwOBA allowed in seven starts. So he has been very, very bad. But this is a bad Reds lineup in San Francisco. Not typically a spot you’d want to go to, but the projection model has surprised me in the past and it might do that again tonight if the Reds go out and have a big game. They’re certainly affordable outside of Stewart & Elly.
Those are the big four spots. No other team implies much above their season average.
Pitchers
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