CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings - MLB DFS Strategy: Friday, April 15th
Happy Friday! We’ve got an 11-game slate on tap for tonight, but the first item of business is a note on change in the LineupHQ Expert Filters.
I have never been a fan of the term ‘Core Plays’ for MLB. It’s such a different type of DFS game, and especially as someone who is focused on tournaments and playing multiple lineups, I feel that this term ‘Core’ as it’s used in other sports just doesn’t fit the nature of MLB. It gives too much weight to a few players, who may or may not fit best in certain lineup builds. We have decided to change the tags that Cards and I are doing to ‘Conviction’, which will give me a little more leeway to recommend the players that I actually like the most on the slate in my own lineups. I was previously too focused on trying to give you the ‘most correct’ points per dollar plays, even when there are other players that I personally like better on that slate. Nothing much is really changing, it’s just that you will be now be able to consider my ‘Conviction’ tags as my personal favorite players, not necessarily just the very obvious ‘best plays’ that will be highest owned and usually considered ‘safest’ for cash games. I would rather be able to show you guys that I feel strongly about, even if they are a bit further off the radar, and I’ll also be able to mention a few more batters than I previously did. If you have any questions about this, just let me know.
And with that, let’s take a look at this 11-game Friday night slate.
Friday Night Pitching
There are a few good pitchers up top, but overall, this is not a deep pitching slate, which should open things up a bit on the offensive side.
Top Tier Trio
Carlos Rodon at Guardians
Dylan Cease vs Rays
Freddy Peralta vs Cardinals
If we want to play the game of ‘which pitchers might be primed for a breakout after one start’, we should play it with Carlos Rodon and Dylan Cease. Rodon stormed out of the gate with 12 strikeouts in five innings against Miami, while Cease struck out eight Tigers in five innings. The thing about these two is that they’ve always had the talent and it would be no surprise at all to see either, or both of them put up big time seasons. Rodon has battled injuries his entire career, but when he’s healthy, he’s been great and we saw a 34.6% K rate in 24 starts last season. The mega first start was an aberration, but there is a lot to like here. The Cleveland’s Of The Galaxy lineup has a lot of contact bats, so the strikeout upside isn’t as extreme as what he saw last week, but these are skills worth buying into.