I got back on the podcast this morning, talking about early-season standouts in the NL East. You can listen to that on Apple or Spotify. Just search “MLB Data Warehouse”.
Welcome to a loaded slate of baseball games on a Monday night. I loved that Friday night action, and I’m going to love this Monday night action all the more.
I’m shifting my personal approach to the slates. Starting right now, I am going minimalistic. The DFS and player props have not been as much fun for me this year as they have in the past, and I’ve been too unstructured with it. So this is an effort for me to make these enjoyable again. And I’m less and less interested in putting money on the table as I go through this. But I still have to have a little skin in the game here, or else I won’t do a good job.
I’m going to play the $5 contest in the DK league that I run for you guys, obviously. And I’m going to try to win that $5 Hundo contest every day. And that’s it on the DFS side.
On the player props, I will pick one and put $10 on it. So that’s $20 a day. And, in my head, I will say that this isn’t my $20 - it’s yours. It’s 20 of the dollars you all give me every day. So, thank you for that.
That means the DFS lineups will be a bit less chalky. I’ll be taking some less-popular pitchers and stacking ideas. But I’m not going to fade the best plays for the sake of fading the best plays.
So let’s bang out this player prop first.
Today’s Prop of the Day
I’ll go with Stu here and agree on Tanner Houck over 4.5 strikeouts. I also streamed him for this week in the home league, so that start with doubly interesting to me now. The Rays lineup isn’t good, so let’s pick on them.
And I’m going to parlay it with Sonny Gray Under 5.5 strikeouts (+110). The model gives a 17-point edge on that one. Together, that’s +233. I’m throwing just $5 on it and calling it a day.
DFS Preview
It looks like the main slate is free of weather concerns. There’s apparently some heavy winds probably heading OUT in the Twins game, so the projections should be boosting homers a little bit in that one.
Let’s try to find some strong but slightly less popular plays to take down this $5 Hundo with tonight.
Pitchers
Let’s just talk about all of the names of interest. This is probably more enjoyable for people to read when I do a little bit more breaking players down.
Tarik Skubal ($10,500) vs. Brewers
This is one of the highest SP prices we have seen this year. Few pitchers deserve it more. The fade angle would be that the Brewers make a lot of contact, and two of Skubal’s three starts have been well short of Cy Young caliber. He has started the year with a 23% K%. I’m guessing that will at least a few points higher after tonight.
But if we’re trying to beat 99 other people, the right move does seem to be to pass on the pitcher who is $700 more expensive than everybody else this early in the season when pitchers are still getting their legs under them. Weird stuff happens a lot early in the season, so I think I’ll pass over Skubal here.
Dylan Cease ($9,800) vs Cubs
This is the one. Cease has a 7.98 ERA after giving up nine earned runs last time out against the Athletics. The Cubs just outscored the Dodgers 20-4 in their last two games. Everything is pointing down on Cease and up on the Cubs. So we jump right on it. Cease is locked in. Projections don’t care about what happened last week. We’ve got Cease for 18.3 points for $9,800. That’s the second-highest raw projection, and it’s slightly better value than the Skubal projections gives us for less ownership.
Clay Holmes ($7,500) vs Twins
I’d like to keep things relatively safe, even with his new approach. But I think I’m jumping at Holmes here. He came out in that last start throwing a ton of four-seamers, and it worked well as he piled up 10 strikeouts. Nobody expected that change of approach, and that’s the kind of stuff that makes Holmes exciting.
The guy has a huge mix of pitches. It’s going to be really interesting to me to see what he decides to settle down with. The Twins are hurting early on with a team OPS under .650. I don’t think team offensive numbers mean much right now, but I also don’t think this Twins lineup is going to prove to be one to avoid with opposing pitchers.
Grant Holmes ($6,500) vs. Blue Jays
If I have to come down in cost a bit, I’m pretty interested in Grant Holmes. I was pretty convinced he’s a good starter coming into the season, but his early-season performance has put him here at $6,500. The command has been a problem (19.5% BB%), but the strikeouts are decent (27% so far). We’re judging him off of 202 pitches this year. The truth is, he was very good in the SP role last year.
I’ve got him for 92 pitches, so we aren’t too worried about some 60-pitch outing. The consensus on the guy is that he’s terrible. I searched his name on X and it’s all people talking about how awful his command is and telling people to bet unders on him tonight. So that makes me like the play. Any time we see a guy who had a nice season one year ago struggling early on, that’s an opportunity to buy. And that’s what we have here. I’ll keep both Holmes in mind for my SP2 slot and let the hitters decide where I go.
Hitting Stacks
It does make sense to stack some hitters with this new approach. I’m not going to do a 1-5 stack every time, but yeah, I’m trying to put up a big score, so we want to lean into the correlations more than we would if just trying to get into the top 40% of finishers.
