August 26 MLB DraftKings Analysis
Alrighty we’ve got a nice Friday Night slate here. I know a lot of the season-long fantasy baseball players have faded a bit on me, but I bet the DFS fervor is still strong.
Join the Friday night contest here.
Pitchers
This is a bit of a tough pitching slate. That’s to say that no duo of pitchers really slaps you in the face. The projections are suggesting we use this player pool to pick from
Gerrit Cole $10,700 vs. OAK
Chris Bassitt $9,900 vs. COL
Shane Bieber $9,100 vs. SEA
Joe Musgrove $9,300 vs. KC
Justin Steele $7,600 vs. MIL
Pretty tough to fade Cole against Oakland in a cash game build, he’s the top floor/ceiling play of the night, I think. The SP2 is tougher. If money didn’t matter I think I’d go for Bassitt, but $9,900 is pretty high. I think Steele at $7,600 is probably the best option per-dollar, but I have this nagging feeling that he’s going to fall apart before the season ends. I just don’t believe in his pitch arsenal, but the results over the last few months are hard to argue with (he has averaged 18.3 DK/GS since June 1st and 20.6 since July 1st). The Brewers are also awful against lefties, as Steele proved last start - so I think I’ll end up with the Cole/Steele combination - which sounds very industrial and manly, so it has that going for it.
Team Offense
Checking the Team Projected Runs Analysis Sheet, we see these teams with the biggest projected run boosts
PHI vs. Wilson +1.2
WSH vs. Minor +0.78
CWS vs. Henry +0.69
SDP vs. Bubic +0.63
NYM vs. Kuhl +0.59
HOU vs. Bradish +0.54
DET vs. Otto +0.36
Everybody else is pretty much even stevens or down, so we can focus on these offenses pretty closely to build the lineups.
The Phillies are easy to figure out against Wilson - we want Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber, but they’re both very expensive.
The Nationals are the most interesting lineup because they get this awesome matchup against Minor who has been murdered by righties all year long, and the Nats’ righties are cheap.
Lane Thomas $2000
Joey Meneses $4100
Alex Call $2000
Luke Voit $3400
Nelson Cruz $3100
Ildemaro Vargas $2000
Call is projected to leadoff at $2000, which is interesting, except he’s been really, really bad in the bigs so far (.130/.200/.261). The guys I want are Meneses, Voit, Cruz, and Thomas. Here are their stats against lefties this year
Meneses: .407/.448/.7758, 20.8% Brl%, 10.3% K%
Thomas: .246/.283/.408, 5.3% Brl%, 20.4% K%
Voit: .151/.283/.226, 6.6% Brl%, 36.2% K%
Cruz: .258/.345/.414, 13.5% Brl%, 16.9% K%
Vargas: .214/.241/.393, 4.5% Brl%, 20.7% K%
So really Meneses and Thomas are the only ones that have been at all competent against lefties. I wouldn’t be stacking the Nationals because they’re just bad - and you could probably even roll the dice on Minor in GPPs now that we’ve seen some of these numbers.
Position-by-Position
Player Name / Salary / Projection / Value
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