DraftKings MLB DFS: Extensive Analysis for Tuesday, April 20

April 20, 2021

Jon Anderson breaks down all the MLB DFS stats you need for tonight's DraftKings slate!

Last Friday I ran through a Twitter thread giving notes about the DFS slate, and it received a pretty warm reception. The head honchos here at RotoBaller decided to do something risky and give me free reign to put my DFS analysis in article format. So here I am, and here it is!

I'm not sure if this is sustainable for me. My original thought was to target Tuesdays and Fridays for this piece since those are typically when the big night slates are on tap, but man this thing took me a while to write up. So this might be a first and last go at it. I hope it finds someone and touches their soul today, and I guess if it helps make someone a little bit of money that would be fine too.

We have 13 games on the board with a weird start time of 6:30. There is at least one game that is nearly a lock to be postponed (PIT @ DET), and there's a seven-inning game on the board as well (MIN @ OAK), so I'm just ignoring those games right off the bat.

MLB DFS Pitchers

Here’s a quick breakdown of every pitcher's salary, SwStr%, CSW%, and GB% using just 2021 data.

Here are the lineup breakdowns, using projected lineups. You’ll see I have the numbers for the big 2019-2021 sample as well as just 2021.

So there’s just some data if you want to be a prude and make your own decisions. Now I will tell you who you actually should choose tonight.

#1 Corbin Burnes, $10,800 vs. Padres

Here’s a breakdown of the SwStr% and CSW% on each of Burnes pitches this year:

You simply cannot say a negative word about what Burnes has done this year. I mean, you could try it I guess by pointing out that he hasn’t reached 90 pitches in a single outing yet. You wouldn’t be lying if you said that, but you would realize it to be a bit disingenuous after you realize he’s turned those sub-90 pitches into DraftKings points totals of 31, 34, and 36 points. Imagine if they let him throw *gasp* ONE HUNDRED pitches tonight. He will probably strike out 26.

The real question on Burnes is about the matchup with the Padres. Here’s how their projected lineup breaks down:

Not a lot of swing-and-miss in that lineup and some obviously scary bats. It’s possible that Grisham does not actually make the lineup, and you would think the Padres would want to work in some rest days for Tatis after he came back from that injury so quickly, but regardless this will be the best lineup Burnes has seen so far this year. But here’s how I feel about that:

Elite pitching beats great offense most times out, and Corbin Burnes should be priced at $11,000 right now. I’m playing him, a lot.

#2 Charlie Morton, $8,100 vs. Yankees

Morton has looked mostly like the guy we’ve come to know, he has piled up 21 strikeouts in 17 innings while facing the Phillies twice and the Marlins once. He has thrown his curveball 29% of the time and then three different fastball variations (sinker, four-seam, cutter) for the other 71%. His four-seamer has been very good with a super high 18% SwStr%, and his curveball has been spectacular with a 19.2% SwStr%, a 41% CSW%, but a surprisingly low 40% ground-ball rate.

Here’s the Yankees' lineup breakdown:

The strikeout quite a bit, but the danger is that they can hit the ball out of the yard. That isn’t reflected in the PA/HR column there because that data is just from 2021, but obviously, Torres and LeMahieu are going to homer more often than they have this year (just one tater between the two of them). The thing to notice is that this entire all of the real home run threats are right-handed in this lineup. Hicks, Gardner, and Odor are not real home-run threats.

Since 2019, Charlie Morton has 2,014 pitches to right-handers. Only five of them have been hit over a fence in fair territory:

That’s all of them. Righties have slugged .292 off of Morton with a 51% ground-ball rate and a 26% strikeout rate. This is actually a really great matchup for Morton to pile up some strikeouts while avoiding the long ball. He’s my second favorite pitcher.

#3 Luis Castillo, $6,600 vs. Diamondbacks

I really don’t have much to say other than to show you this chart:

We see Castillo under $7,000 today. That’s $1,400 cheaper than he had ever been from 2019 to 2020.

The only way I wouldn’t jump on this kind of price tag is if I thought the guy was hurt. There’s not a lot of evidence of that right now. His four-seamer is coming in more at 95 than 97 like it has in the past, but his changeup is still working great with a 20% SwStr% and a 60% GB%. He’s given up too many barrels early on, all coming on either the four-seamer or the sinker.

Maybe it’s not the safest play in the world, but I will always favor the three-year sample of data over the three-start sample, and doing so makes Castillo look about $2,000 too cheap.

#4 Brad Keller, $5,400 vs. Rays

Since 2019 this dude has averaged just 4.2 strikeouts and 14 DraftKings points per outing, and he’s already turned in a complete killer of a score this year, but it’s not fair to price him at $5,400. I hope he doesn’t see this price tag it honestly could and should hurt his feelings.

Are you going to get 25 points from Brad Keller? Probably not. Can he find his way to the mid-teens and flirt with 20? Yes, and I would even expect it in this spot. This Rays lineup strikes out a ton:

The good thing about the lineup is that they take a lot of walks, but Keller really doesn’t have an issue with that. This is a strike-throwing, ground-ball-inducing starter against a lineup that can hand him an extra strikeout or two. For $5,400 it’s tough not to want some.

The Verdict

My cash game pitchers will be Corbin Burnes and Charlie Morton, which costs me $18,900. That’s not cheap, but it’s certainly not overly restrictive on the bats. In fact, we still have an average of $3,888 left per hitter even after spending up on Burnes as our SP1.

Hitters

The truth is (I have a Master’s Degree in Data Science therefore I am one of the few purveyors of the whole and absolute truth) that we try way too hard when trying to predict what hitters are going to do on a day-to-day basis. In reality, it’s an exercise of randomness.

Maybe that’s an extreme statement, it’s not completely random. Hitters do score fantasy points on average as the opposing starting pitcher’s salary falls (meaning it is smarter over time to start hitters when they are facing cheap starting pitchers), but it’s obvious to say that there are no safe floors when it comes to hitters.

I don’t know if my approach is truly the right one, but I typically just keep it really simple when I’m picking hitters. I’m looking for only a few things:

1. Hitters that are cheaper than usual
2. Hitters at the top of the lineup that usually aren’t
3. Massive platoon advantages

Let’s just knock those out one by one.

Price Analysis

Every day I have a script that compares each player’s price with their season average. Here are the biggest discounts of the day:

That doesn’t mean I love all of these hitters. You see a lot of Yankee righties here that are being discounted, and that’s for good reason in the matchup against Morton who doesn’t give up homers to righties. There is also the case of players that were just way overpriced early on and are now back to where they should be (David Fletcher, Yasmani Grandal, Andrew Benintendi, Paul DeJong, Randy Arozarena for example here).

From the list above the guys, I would jump on at these lower price tags tonight are J.D. Davis, Austin Riley, Kole Calhoun, Hunter Dozier, Fernando Tatis, and Josh Rojas.

Cheapest Stacks

Stacks are a good idea, and I even like playing them in cash just because of the correlation you get. In any situation, you want all of your players to score points, and it turns out that hitters hitting consecutively in the lineup have their outcomes correlated, so I typically pick a few offenses to build my lineup out of and look at the top four in their lineup.

Here’s the cheapest 1-4’s with the hitters from the projected lineups. It’s an Excel pivot table so it looks a little weird, but this is an unprofessional production and I’m sure you’ll figure it out get off my back!

I’m going to steer clear of Luis Castillo but the Brewers against Paddack and the Marlins against Harvey are crazy great value stacks there (more on Harvey in a bit).

If we scroll down a little further, the Mets prices really stick out:

I think Arrieta will show up in the splits department too, but these Mets price tags are low because of their slow start to the season, and that’s a mistake! Going to be cold in Chicago tonight I think cause I actually live pretty close to there and it’s freakin snowing right now, but I don’t care Conforto at $3,500 is wild to me I'm IN.

Some no-thanks stacks because of price to me would be the Nationals against Wainwright, Phillies against Webb, Padres against Burnes, Reds against Gallen, and Red Sox against Ryu.

Splits

Here is a chart of every pitcher with a split that has caused a .400+ slugging percentage over the last two seasons

Pirates righties would be the big winner here, but we already mentioned that that game probably isn’t going to happen. That gives the crown to Matt Harvey, who has given up a .505 slugging percentage to lefties, which is only a little bit worse than his .488 mark against righties.

Right after Harvey is Arrieta against lefties. After that, things level off a bit.

In terms of home runs allowed, here are the most frequent home run hitter splits against the pitchers on the board tonight.

Shoemaker and Manaea are in those seven-inning games and it's pretty thin to play a hitter in such a contest, so I'm not worried about them. Taijuan Walker looks like a different pitcher this year than in the past, so I’d still be locked in on Harvey and Arrieta there.

Lineup Spots

This is one I can’t really talk about right now because no lineups are out, but typically the projected lineups are pretty good. Here is a list of hitters below $4,000 and in the top four of the lineup that I like (I removed Tigers/Pirates because of weather and some other hitters because they’re facing a pitcher I don’t want to mess with):

There will certainly be a hitter or two that is surprisingly in the top four of the lineup once lineups start rolling out, so we’ll have to keep an eye out for that, but I absolutely will not be updating this post because I have kids and I don’t really care about you that much.

Bullpens

Little bonus for your asses! Yesterday I wrote a Python script to go retrieve every team’s active bullpen and then filter out players that I think will be unavailable tonight based on how many pitches they have thrown in the last two days. After it has that list of pitchers it calculates the collective bullpen statistics. Here goes the full list for teams on the slate tonight. I ordered it by slugging percentage.

We’ve pretty much gone this whole post without talking about the fact that the Astros are in Coors Field, which probably means I should cancel my home Internet service and never write about baseball again. But hey, the Astros are in a pretty sweet spot in Coors. After they get rid of Jon Gray they have a trash heap bullpen to go against for a few innings.

More reason to avoid the Nationals there as Wainwright will be followed by some really good arms (provided the game is close, which might not be the case), and even more reason to love the Mets! That Orioles bullpen is showing in the middle of the pack, but it’s a contact heavy bullpen so there’s some good news to be taken from it.

You can view the chart and glean much more, but of course, this is really guesswork considering we’re considering a handful or more of arms for each team and in most cases, only two or three of them will appear in the game tonight.

My Guys

I’ll wrap this all up with my player pool, why not!

Cash pitchers: Burnes, Morton
Tourney pitchers: Burnes, Morton, Castillo, Keller

C: Kirk (2.9K), Alfaro (3.0K), Narvaez (3.6K)
1B: Vogelbach (2.7K), Aguilar (3.7K), Hiura (4.0K), Gurriel (4.4K), Walsh (4.8K)
2B: Adrianza (2.0K), McNeil (3.6K), Chisholm (3.9K)
SS: DeJong (3.7K), Lindor (4.7K), Correa (4.8K), Story (5.6K)
3B: JD Davis (3.3K), B. Anderson (3.5K), A. Diaz (4.0K), Shaw (4.1K)
OF: Sierra (2.0K), DJ Stewart (2.8K), Dickerson (3.1K), Tapia (3.4K), Nimmo (3.5K), A. Garcia (3.5K), Upton (3.5K), Conforto (3.5K), Santander (3.9K), Duvall (4.2K), Tucker (4.3K), D. Smith (4.4K), Brantley (4.6K), Blackmon (5.2K), Trout (6.0K)

That’s it and that’s all, thanks for being here, I guess!