MLB DW Slate Preview - April 6th
Breaking down Monday's MLB action through a DFS and betting lens
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Happy Monday! I don’t get to do much baseball stuff on Sundays because I’m a church-going family man. So by the time we get church and lunch done, it’s too late for me to play anything. That’s for the best. I really should take Sunday off as much as possible.
But it always gets me geared up for a Monday slate.
I’m writing for The Action Network a few times a week. They give their team of writers one game each, and we are to write it up from a betting perspective and provide some plays. I’ve got 2/3 so far, and I put out two plays for the Dodgers/Blue Jays game.
Justin Wrobleski Under 14.5 Outs
Dodgers Over 1.5 Team Homers
The prices have gotten worse since I wrote the article, which is a good sign for me, but there they are.
I really would love to have the time to dive into a handful of games a day, finding angles and bets and stuff. With how many markets there are and the projections I have available to me, I’m pretty certain I could be profitable. But I don’t think we’ll ever know.
Matchups Model
I need to hype up the matchups model more than I have been. Although, I did bury it behind the MLB DW PRO paywall. I’ve ended the standard subscriber sale, but the MLB PRO sale will go on. It’s still just $175/year. That gets you everything. Daily projections, betting and DFS tools, and that matchups model result daily.
So let’s take a look. Let me first explain to people less familiar.
What this thing does is look at the movement profiles of every pitcher’s pitches, and then groups them together with the league’s most similar pitches. It then looks at each hitter on the day with the probable pitcher they’re facing, and it sees how that hitter has performed against those similar pitches in recent years.
So it effectively is a “batter vs. pitcher” type stats, except it has actual significant sample sizes. Instead of just looking at how Shohei Ohtani does against Max Scherzer, it looks how Shohei Ohtani does against all right-handed pitchers with the most similar pitch movement (including velo, obviously) to Scherzer.
I open that up and do this every day:
This result gives us all of the hitters with xwOBA over .370, SwStr% under 10%, and Brl% above 10% against the types of pitches they’re going to see a lot of tonight. Obviously the stud hitters will appear a lot, and the prices and stuff are always tough on those guys.
But every day we’ll get some guys like Alec Burleson, Josh Bell, Dillon Dingler, and Jordan Beck - who show up today with nice spots. I like taking these types of guys sometimes for a homer, but mostly for stuff like total bases and H+R+RBI lines. The Ohtani (not there because of a higher SwStr%, but his Brl% was 24%), Tucker, and Freeman show-ups here put me on that over 1.5 Dodgers homer line.
There are just so many ways you can use this data. On the app (if you sign in with the PRO password), you will find it all there, and there’s a “Show Team Ranks” button that sums up the team data and ranks every offense.
I try not to hype up things that I don’t truly believe are useful, but I do think this is a good one, and it can really benefit your betting and even DFS processes.
The other way you can spin it is by filtering to the dudes are likely to make the most contact today. These are largely unsurprising names, but you’ll find some dudes. Here are today’s hitters with sub-7% SwStr% with higher hard hit rates.
Not a surprise to ever see Vlad and Yandy here, but hey - Joey Ortiz hits these sorts of righties well as far as making contact a lot and hitting it relatively hard.
BOOM HITTERS
I’ve been doing these since last year. It’s the same thing as what I just put up above, but it filters to the same criteria every day to isolate the best chances for doubles or homers. We have six today:
Jordan Beck hasn’t been playing every day, but it’s a good matchup for him against this Cody Bolton guy if he does make it into the lineup today.
Home Run Picks
There’s a new home run cheat sheet for PRO members. It checks my model’s implied home run prices against what the books are giving, and adds in some matchups model stuff. It then does recommendations. So if the book’s price is higher than the price my model would assign, and if the hitters has an above-average result for home run hitting in the matchups model, it will say that home run bet is recommended.
I will start tracking those today to see if we’re making a profit. Here are your picks today:
Kyle Tucker +480 on FanDuel
George Springer +511 on DraftKings
Brenton Doyle +680 on FanDuel
Vlad Guerrero Jr. +560 on FanDuel
Mickey Moniak +480 on FanDuel
That might tell you a little something about where the best home run prices are.
DFS Preview & Bets Along the Way
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Now let’s get down to BUSINESS! DFS is the thing I’m most here for.
It’s a cold and cloudy night across the league, but Roth isn’t giving any game an orange or red score. That is always the best way to start off.
There’s a decent turbo five-game turbo slate, which I might play myself, but for the sake of time, I’m going to write up the main slate.
RUN IMPLICATIONS:
The Astros are in Colorado against Ryan Feltner, and it’s 66 degrees. They’re almost 1.5 runs clear of the field. That is what I think you consider good chalk. And there’s a lot of Cam Smith hype going around, and for good reason. He’s looking good this year, and he was a sharp breakout pick from the pre-season as a former first-round pick who got his first full look at MLB pitching a year ago and struggled. It was sharp to expect he’d improve this year, and the early signs are good on that. The projections won’t be over the moon about him because of the bad numbers last year, but I’ll want some Smith at $3,900 in DFS tonight.
The Dodgers might be a touch under-owned because of this Astros spot and because of the name value of Max Scherzer being up against them. But Scherzer has given up 2.0 HR/9 since last year. He’s quite easy to take deep, even though his stuff and command are still pretty good when he’s healthy.