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Jon Anderson breaks down all the MLB DFS stats you need for tonight's DraftKings slate!
Welcome back to my little corner of RotoBaller where I have been graciously allowed to roam somewhat free on DFS analysis on Tuesdays and Fridays. For more details throughout the day, you can follow me on Twitter @JonPGH.
Today I will focus less on my own verbose advice and just present you all with the data I use. Below you will find numerous tables that are searchable and filterable. You will have to flip through the pages or search to see the full results because I didn't want to dump 25+ rows all on one screen there.
Let's get going here and jump into this massive Friday night 14-game slate!
The Elephant in the Room: Coors Field
I like handling Coors Field by itself before proceeding because it's just such a unique situation. Since the 2019 season began, hitters have scored 2.03 DraftKings points per game in Coors Field. The league average is 1.75, meaning hitters get about a 14% boost by playing in Coors. So far this year (11 games), the Coors number has come down to average at 1.74. Some probable reasons contributing to that:
- Small sample randomness
- Nolan Arenado is gone
- Weather (it's been really cold for most of these games)
- Jacob deGrom, Clayton Kershaw, Trevor Bauer, Walker Buehler, Julio Urias, and Marcus Stroman have all made starts in Coors so far
The visiting starter tonight is Vince Velasquez, a far cry from the names above. Rockies hitters are in a nice spot here and they aren't very expensive. On the Phillies side, however, they face German Marquez. Since 2019, visiting hitters have scored 1.88 DraftKings points per plate appearance in games started by Marquez. That is still above the average, but it's significantly less than what other Rockies starters have done. That said, the Phillies are still in a plus spot (especially considering the brutal bullpen the Rockies have), but they are not priced like it. Here's the salary breakdown for these two squads, the "Mean" column is their average salary this year and the "Delta" is today's salary minus the average.
The biggest beneficiaries at Coors are line drive and fly ball hitters. This is because the main effect of Coors is the massive outfield that turns a lot of flyouts into extra-base hits. My favorite plays in this game considering price are Andrew McCutchen, Alec Bohm, Raimel Tapia, and Trevor Story.
Now for the rest of the slate!
MLB DFS DraftKings Pitchers
All the above data is 2021 data only. Parsing through the table you'll see that Sandy Alcantara is third on the slate in SwStr%, and yet he is the 12th most expensive pitcher. The cash approach seems extremely straightforward, pair up deGrom (or Glasnow if you really need the extra $700) with Alcantara.
To give you some more information before talking about recommendations, here is the lineup breakdown. This takes every hitter in today's projected lineups and calculates their collective stats from 2021. Check it out:
Mike Minor gets the best strikeout match-up as the Tigers projected lineup has a 28% strikeout rate. Andrew Heaney, Yu Darvish, Huascar Ynoa, and Yusei Kikuchi draw the worst match-ups for strikeout purposes. In terms of teams that are deficient of power, Alex Wood, Erick Fedde, and Martin Perez find themselves in good spots as their opponents have homered at very low rates this year. The Giants are surprisingly second on the list in terms of home run frequency, homering once every 21 plate appearances. I would not expect that to stay true all season when looking at the names in the lineup, and Alcantara is a ground-ball pitcher so that number doesn't bother me much.
While you use the above data to make your own decisions, here is what I came away with.
Cash player pool: deGrom, Glasnow, Alcantara
GPP player pool: deGrom, Glasnow, Alcantara, Minor, Heaney, Ynoa, Marquez
Hitters
First, let's take a look at the biggest splits advantage hitters have tonight. Here is the full pitcher split breakdown. For each pitcher on the slate, there is a row in this table for what they've done against both righties and lefties. You will have to sort or search this table to really get a feel for it since it's quite a lot of data.
You can see that Cole Irvin has had trouble with lefties, but that's just 22 plate appearances worth of data so we won't read too much into it. The real platoon advantages seem to be these:
- RHB vs. Steven Matz: .525 SLG, 11.2% Brl%, 11.3 PA/HR
- RHB vs. Huascar Ynoa: .515 SLG, 13.6% Brl%, 16.5 PA/HR
- LHB vs. Luke Weaver: .510 SLG, 10.2% Brl%, 14.5 PA/HR
- LHB vs. Casey Mize: .500 SLG, 14.5% Brl%, 16.7 PA/HR
- LHB vs. Jorge Lopez: .472 SLG, 10.3% Brl%, 15.4 PA/HR
Matz has looked great early on this year with his new team, but if you include 2020 in it, righties have been making a ton of loud contact off of him. That doesn't mean I want to play someone who rarely homers like Yandy Diaz, but it's good news for Randy Arozarena, Manuel Margot, and Mike Brosseau.
The nut match-up of the day seems to be the Braves against Weaver. You can see above what lefties have done to Weaver, but righties aren't far behind with a .420 SLG, 8.8% Brl%, but just a 39 PA/HR. That PA/HR is a little interesting considering the high barrel rate and the extremely low amount of ground-balls Weaver generates against righties (29% ground-ball rate). The Braves are the top offense on the board tonight, but they are quite expensive. Acuna and Freeman are both priced above $6,000 which is really tough to get to. The affordable plays are Marcell Ozuna, Travis d'Arnaud, and Ozzie Albies.
Matt Olson, Mitch Moreland, and Jed Lowrie are in a good spot against homer-happy Jorge Lopez.
Despite the good spot the Royals appear to be in, they really don't have any lefties in the lineup that seem poised to take advantage, so I would not be overly excited about that spot.
Some other home run-friendly spots: Cleveland RHB against Montgomery (17.4 PA/HR), Rangers LHB vs. Cease (22 PA/HR), and Mets lefties against Fedde (just a 10% K%) there.
Here's the bullpen report for today. For this report, I wrote a script that filters the bullpens down to just who is likely available tonight. Any pitcher that is on the IL or has thrown a ton of pitches in the last two days is left out. That, I think, makes this the most useful bullpen report you'll find.
If the match-up with Weaver weren't enough, the bullpen situation really puts them over the top. This report also makes an Angels stack seem enticing. Right-handed batters have quietly crushed Greinke to the tune of a .495 slugging percentage since 2020, and the arms following him tonight are pretty mediocre (besides Ryan Pressly if they can get to him).
Now here is the full salary breakdown. In this chart, I take every hitter on the board and compare their salary today with their average salary on the season. I love buying low on hitters, and this chart helps us spot those guys.
The discounts I am most interested in are probably Clint Frazier, David Fletcher, Gio Urshela, Giancarlo Stanton, and Manuel Margot.
Recommendations
I'll just break this down into price tiers and give a handful of names I like in each tier.
Expensive ($5,000+): Ronald Acuna Jr., Freddie Freeman, Nick Castellanos, Marcell Ozuna, Pete Alonso, Trevor Story, Jose Ramirez, Ozzie Albies, Matt Olson
Middle ($4,000-$5,000): Alex Bregman, Jed Lowrie, Franmil Reyes, Randy Arozarena, Eugenio Suarez, Travis d'Arnaud, Joey Gallo, Giancarlo Stanton
Cheap (< $4,000): Jordan Luplow, J.D. Davis, Hunter Dozier, Michael Conforto, Phil Evans, Alec Bohm Seth Brown, Kyle Lewis, Mitch Moreland, Manuel Margot
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