MLB DW Slate Breakdown - May 19
It's Tuesday! Jon breaks down the angles on the DFS slate and more
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I love a Tuesday MLB slate. Especially after the optimizer and the projections took me to my best DFS night in a couple of years. But I’m going to have to try to hold back from chasing another MME situation, as my son is graduating from preschool tonight and I don’t want to be the dude making late swaps during the ceremony. But some things are out of our control in life, you know? Wish me patience, resolve, and wisdom tonight. And shout out to my boy for doing what 99% of preschoolers do - graduate. But you’ve gotta start somewhere!
Honestly, the kid is a stud. He’s five. And my kids like math. Or at least they like showing off that they know how to do some addition. So last night, my seven year old daughter asks him what six plus six equals. And I kid you not, what he does is he goes and buries his head into his pillow and just sits there for ten seconds or so, and then pops up and goes TWELVE!
Which was amazing to me. I don’t know where the bar is set here, but I feel like most five year olds wouldn’t be able to pull that off. Especially without using something to count with. He just closed his eyes and like visualized the count, or something like that. I was blown away. And then I went and took myself to second place out of thousands of lineups with a Diamondbacks stack. Who has it better??
Weather
It’s alllll green tonight, and it is HOT. Look at some of these temps:
NYM/WSH 92 degrees
CIN/PHI 95 degrees
TOR/NYY 91 degrees
SF/ARI 87 degrees
It’s under 60 degrees only in HOU/MIN and TEX/COL.
Jon & Trevor Live Stream
Me and Trevor talked for 50 minutes about some betting stuff and DFS plays for tonight. View it here:
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1pKdRbpdwXgJW
Or here if you wanna watch it on YouTube:
We’re going to try to do this at least 1-2 times a week. So your feedback is valuable. Maybe we’ll try to each come up with a handful of bets to go through and then do some more game-by-game stuff for the DFS slates.
But it was a lot of fun, if nothing else. And we aren’t skimping out on the written articles because we did it, either!
And I’ll extend this offer one more time. If anybody wants to give me $250,000 cash today, I will quit my job and do these daily. Just let me know, don’t all come at me at once.
Early Game
The Marlins host the Braves at 4:10pm. It’s two bad lefties going at it (Martin Perez ATL, Braxton Garret MIA). And the Braves just put Drake Baldwin on the IL, but they will return Ronald Acuna Jr. for this one. So a pretty clean swap there. Not a decimated Braves lineup after all, but Acuna hasn’t been great and he’s just getting back into it. And the rest of this lineup isn’t the most frightening one without Baldwin in there, at least against left handed pitching.
But I guess I’d rather just ignore that game. Garrett looked awful in the first outing, and his ceiling has always been extremely capped.
Turbo Slate
I’ll just give you the data here before speeding toward the main slate. Here are your implied totals:
The Nationals have scored and allowed the most runs in baseball this year. The allowed part isn’t surprising, but nobody saw them being +12 on the second place team (ATL) in run scoring this year. There’s a little disparity here because their team OPS ranks fifth. So that’s still very good, but they’ve a bit lucky to have scored as many runs as they have. They have a league-leading 19 homers with men in scoring position. So the hits are timed well, and that’s not something that is “sticky”.
It’s Foster Griffin for the Nats taking on the Mets in that one. Griffin got tanked last time out, but other than that he’s been very good. I’m not a believer in the guy, but he’s much better than Mikolas and Irvin. So I wouldn’t want to go crazy on the Mets stacks and bets.
But it should be a pretty clean win for the Mets behind Nolan McLean. And the Mets are only -143 here. So I like their chances.
In Philly, we have Chase Burns against Jesus Luzardo. I wrote this one for Action Network, and discovered that Burns has been walking lefties at a super high rate this year, and he’s given up all but one of his homers to the southpaw hitter. With Schwarber, Harper, Marsh, and Stott all crushing right now, it could be a trap spot for Burns in that heat.
I’d be on the Phillies, and I’d be on Burns over 1.5 walks and over 1.5 earned runs.
Here are you pitcher projections for the turbo:
Pretty decent pitching slate for a four-gamer. It could also be a trap for Luzardo with his lack of consistency and a decent Reds lineup in the high temps.
So maybe I’d go more for Parker Messick and the red hot Kyle Bradish on this slate. Griffin Jax is also of interest to me. He’s coming off of a bad one with a 1:4 K:BB and a 7.6% SwStr% against the Blue Jays. But this is a good matchup with the Orioles, and he did throw a season-high 66 pitches last time. So he could push for 75 pitches here at a low price, and that’s pretty good to me.
The projections don’t like Nolan McLean after all. I suppose that’s fair with how well the Nats have hit the ball, but I don’t know, at 22% ownership I think I’d go pretty heavy on him. His stuff can dominate anybody.
Here are the team hitting projections:
Projections work both ways, so the Nationals lead the slate in projected fantasy point scoring. That’s pretty shocking, and not something I’m confident in.
There’s no runaway stack to me. I like the Phillies at lower ownership against Burns. Already talked about that above. There’s not a truly bad pitcher on this slate, other than maybe Keider Montero (vs. CLE).
Main Slate
Implied Totals
No huge totals on this one, either. It’s a strong pitching slate overall.
Dodgers vs. Griffin Canning
Why would the Dodgers have this low of a team total against Canning? The books seem to like Canning for some reason. And this is a guy with a 22% K% and an 11% BB% with a .338 xwOBA allowed over the last two years. The game’s in San Diego; a tougher place to hit than Dodger Stadium, but come on now! I like the Dodgers a lot against Canning.