Opening Night Preview
Updates on MLB DW content and some thoughts on the first game of the year
Welcome to the 2026 regular season! There’s one lonely game tonight out there in California on Netflix. So that’s strange. But the rules of the last 15 years have been that you can never do the same things in two consecutive years. At least this game is being played in America!
The biggest thing I want to hit on in this post is how to access everything.
Things are different this year. I’ll be hosting most of the useful things on the web app. You can click that, but you’ll need a password to get in. The password is hosted in the Resource Glossary page. The other difference is that we have two different payment tiers this year.
Basic Paid
MLB DW Pro
The MLB DW Pro people are the ones who get access to the daily projections and all of the stuff that directly spins off of them. So if you’re here for betting and DFS, Pro is for you. If you’re just a season-long player or a fan of the game, a normal paid sub is for you.
Become a paid subscriber here.
Because of this distinction, there are two resource glossary pages now.
RESOURCE GLOSSARY FOR BASIC PAID SUBS
RESOURCE GLOSSARY FOR MLB DW PRO MEMBERS
The passwords and links to all of the different dashboards and tools will be hosted there. The Tableau dashboards are open to all paid subs, both basic and PRO.
So let’s talk about that web app for a minute. Here’s a three minute video about the changes and how the navigation has changed a bit. Long story short, you have to choose a “section” and then the pages in that section will show up below for your choosing.
So if you choose “Season Long Fantasy” in the top menu, the relevant pages show below for your choosing:
If you choose “PRO”, those pages appear:
If you choose a PRO page but you’re not signed in with the PRO password, you get COCKED!
HA HA!
Here’s a video of me going through it if that helps:
Any questions about that, just comment or tag/DM me on X. You might have to try a couple of times, I don’t read all of my replies, and a lot of those DMs get hidden.
Now let’s talk about some baseball!
Yankees vs. Giants
We always have to start talking about the pitchers. It’s also always way more fun to start everything with a conspiracy theory. Most conspiracy theories aren’t true, but they’re all really entertaining.
X is just a mess with absolute fish betting accounts right now. Everybody has a “vibe-coded” model. And they’re mostly going to be trash. You have to distrust anybody who just started coding stuff in the last year. The cheap stuff will be a lot better than the cheap stuff before this AI revolution, but it’s still not going to be anywhere near good enough to actually beat these sports books.
A major red flag you find with baseball handicappers is whether they primarily talk about home run bets. There are very few truly profitable home run lines offered, especially for the game’s big names. Look at tonight. You’re getting the best price of around +270 for Judge tonight, and this is about as tough a spot as you’ll find. My model’s fair price is +340.
Betting on these studs to hit homers is almost always hugely negative EV. So if you find somebody giving out those picks all the time, you pretty much know they’re not going to help you.
To get back to the pitching:
Webb and Fried are both built up after having normal springs. I guess Webb didn’t have a normal spring with the WBC, but if anything, that heightens his readiness for the regular season. They both threw 80+ pitches in their final outing six days ago. We should expect both guys to throw around 90.
Max Fried’s fastball velo was down 1.5mph this spring. That’s not uncommon for the guy, so it wasn’t something we were reacting to at all. We’ll keep an eye on that for season-long leagues. He averaged around 96 last year, and he’s been around 94-95 this spring.
Some lineup stats:
The Yankees swing for the fences, the Giants get balls in play. Some splits:
Webb ramped up the strikeout rate last year, but it was mostly because of gains against righties. He attacks them with sinkers, sweepers, and changeups. And there are some four-seamers and cutters mixed in. The guy can do a lot of different things.
One bet that pops out in the model is: Aaron Judge Under 0.5 BB. He’s an intentional walk risk like few others are, but I and The Bat X would both make the fair price for under 0.5 about -130, and you can buy this one for about even money.
These truly are the types of bets you’re looking for to have long-term success. It’s these markets that the books aren’t paying as much attention to because there’s not the level of volume or opportunity for them.
This has become a bit of a betting article, I guess! Not the original intent, but when you’re looking at just a single game and want some predictive action, that’s your only option!
The model’s favorite plays:
Logan Webb over 16.5 outs -115
Jung Hoo Lee over 1.5 hits +130
But big disclaimer here. Everything has just been fired up. I’m seeing mostly “overs” on the bets again. And that should be expected, I guess, because most bets the books offer are “overs” (which should tell you something right off the bat!), but there needs to be some adjustments. I need to continue to fine-tune and check the projections to make sure we’re using the right data samples, and we’ll have to adjust the bet recommendations based on how they perform through the early months.
I’ll keep at it.
My plan is to try to steal my in-laws’ Netflix account and watch some baseball just for the sake of the baseball tonight. I’ll be a real purist before dropping 150 lineups into a DFS tournament tomorrow.
By the way, I’ll be going live on Substack with a couple of other baseball Substack creators tomorrow around 12:30 for a little Opening Day preview! If you have the Substack app, you should get a notification. But I’ll post it on X as well.
Happy new season, everybody! Thanks for being here, and let’s hope we can make it worth your while!