The Baseball Diaries April 24
Hello everyone and welcome to my Baseball Diaries. This article is going to recap the previous night’s performance of my team as well as one of my competitors. The goal is to give a bit of insight as to why the players were selected and maybe some roster configuration tactics. No matter how good of a fantasy player someone thinks they are, no one can predict the future. All we can do is use our best judgment and sound strategy to be successful. So in lieu of handing out player picks, I present to you my Baseball Diaries.
Today I’m going to break down STLCards a little from what I saw in last nights Fanduel Monster. One thing I like to do is look at some of the other players and see what they are doing on a nightly basis. I have gandered at his teams in the past and picked up a couple of things that I found interesting.
Notable Facts
- 621 Entries in the Monster
- STLCards 24 entries in the Monster
- Used Greinke on 14 teams, Wacha on 9 teams and Masterson on 1 team
- Used a 3-4 man mini stack with Detroit, Baltimore, White Sox, Tampa Bay Rays, Toronto and the Padres
- Used Indians mini stack 0 times vs. Vargas. I suspect this is because I’ve seen him use Vargas on numerous occasions this year so he has a biased towards him and thus no mini stacks against him.
- High Scoring Nelson Cruz owned by 11.8% of the field. STLCards used him on 4 teams.
- Most highly owned player for STLCards was Victor Martinez on 9 teams
- Wacha and Greinke combined to land on rosters 66% in the Monster
Team Breakdowns
STLCards Team
I’m pretty sure that STLCards has a big glob of pine tar caked on his hand, neck or somewhere we don’t care to look right now(nether regions?) because he is ripping it up thus far in MLB. However I think I can bring a bit of clarity to this wacky Wednesday MLB game set. Cards winning team was just a straight game stack of the Jays and the Orioles. When a game ends up with a 10-8 score and features 7 home runs, there is little doubt that it is a GPP winning game if stacked together. The key for this team, however, was the home runs by bottom of the order dwellers Ryan Goins and Brett Lawrie. He used Goins on 3 of 24 teams and he used Lawrie 2 times. I suspect that on this team he plugged in the top 4 Baltimore power hitters and filled in the rest with Jays. That landed him little owned Goins and Lawrie almost out of necessity. He stacked this particular game 3 times. And even though the other two teams had 20 point Zack Greinke on them, they were not as successful because they didn’t feature the combo of Goins and Lawrie.
My Team
Well I was watching this Orioles game and saw the home run explosion and thought I had a shot at some decent money. Then I logged in to Fanduel and was disappointed to see that everybody seemed to have similar teams. It was a short, odd night where we all looked at the games and saw the same players to select. My “out of the box” pick was Asdrubal Cabrera. I had enough to afford Reyes but liked Asdrubal and wanted that zig while everyone else zagged. He ended with 5.75 and launched a warning track shot in the 6th that would have made things interesting but, wait for it now; if “if” were a 5th we’d all be drunk. I usually like the MLB slates when there are 8-10 games as opposed to a full Friday night slate but Wednesday night was just too much overlap. I know it’s only Thursday but TGIF tomorrow.
Summary
Here is the real oddity about this night in MLB. The Toronto/Baltimore game stacks littered all across the top of the GPP’s on Fanduel, specifically the Monster.Monster. Fanduel does a great job of preventing straight team stacking. Draftkings is far more lenient as they allow 6 hitters per team. However on the DK Perfect game a Baltimore or Toronto stack did not even win it. the 1st place team and 4 of the top 6 had a team that featured a combo of hitters from different teams. So there is hope for non-stackers.