CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings - MLB DFS Strategy: Monday, April 18th
Happy Monday! We start our week off with a 9-game slate that features the Phillies flying into Colorado on wings made of chalk. But before we get to that, let’s open the week with a little Fireside Chat with Cheese.
For today’s Fireside Chat, let’s look at some dates on the calendar:
Originally Scheduled Start of Camp – February 16th – 21st
Originally Scheduled Spring Training Games Start – February 26th
Originally Scheduled Opening Day – March 31st
Actual Start of Camp – March 11th – 14th
Actual Spring Training Games Start – March 17th
Actual Opening Day – April 7th
What does this mean??? This means that if we had a normal spring with no lockout, the players would have been in camp for six weeks prior to Opening Day and would have been playing spring games for a full month before Opening Day.
In reality, we are currently less than 6 weeks from when the players reported to camp, and based on a spring training start of March 17th, using a normal schedule, Opening Day wouldn’t even happen until later this week. Folks, yes baseball has felt even more variant than usual, and there is nothing even moderately surprising about this. The season should not have even started yet! Players are still warming up and getting into shape. Don’t freak out! Stop, Breathe! Again, in a normal season, games wouldn’t have even started yet.
Going into Sunday, the Oakland A’s led the league in runs scored, the Oakland A’s. Do you think the Oakland A’s are going to lead the league in runs scored this season? Of course not, this is all a big whoop-dee-doo! We are slowly but surely seeing the pitch counts rise, we will get there. While you should never overreact to small sample sizes, this is even more true when those small sample sizes are essentially spring training games.
Now, on a different note, if you feel like you need something to freak out about, I will say that there appears to be some chance we are dealing with another ‘de-juiced’ baseball situation. As you probably recall, we’ve seen MLB messing with the balls over the past few seasons, and based on early season HR/FB numbers, there may be another over-correction happening. I am going to give it a few more weeks before making any definitive judgments, as it is still possible that this all has more to do with the lack of a spring training. If you want to know my official opinion as of today, I think they are using a deadened baseball, and home runs will continue to be down until/if that changes. But, I don’t know this yet, and I don’t know to what extent. We will check back in on this in a few weeks after we get past the point when the season should have actually started.
Thank you for attending this Fireside Chat with Cheese, now let’s get on with the show!
Monday Slate Big Picture
Before I jump in and start breaking down the pitching options, let’s take a bird’s eye view look at this slate. Everything about this slate essentially comes down to how you want to handle the Phillies at Coors Field. The top five projected scorers on the slate are all Phillies and we’re looking at a team total essentially 2+ runs ahead of anyone else on the slate. The ‘good news’ is that they are priced up enough that it is not easy to just jam them in, and you will have to make a decision between high end pitching and the high-end Phillies bats. We’ll talk through that choice as we go, it’s just such an obvious spot tonight that it colors everything else we look at on this slate.
The other thing to note that could shake this slate up more are 2-3 games with extremely dicey weather. We’ve got a Red/Orange from Roth in the Diamondbacks-Nationals game and an Orange in the Giants-Mets game. The Rays-Cubs game is also a bit on the fritz, though at this point I’m assuming that one plays. What this means for me is that I’m not including pitchers from those first two games in my initial player pool.
Monday Night Pitching
One Ace and Four Other Aces
Clayton Kershaw vs Braves
Sean Manaea vs Reds
Frankie Montas vs Orioles
Shane McClanahan at Cubs
Aaron Nola at Rockies
The opening start for Clayton Kershaw was vintage Clayton Kershaw, which is to say, best pitcher in the league type of stuff. He threw seven perfect innings and then exited after 80 pitches. It’s wild that he was able to not just throw the shortened perfect game, but that he struck out 13 batters with diminished velocity. I honestly don’t know what to make of this start. I mean, he’s awesome, he’s always been awesome and he’ll always be awesome when healthy. I don’t actually believe that we’re likely to see overall growth in his strikeout rate on lower velocity, it doesn’t make sense, but it also doesn’t matter. Even 2020-2021 Kershaw is the best pitcher on this slate in any matchup. He should very slowly tick up from the 80 pitches, though the fact that he was pulled from a perfect game means he still has some sort of cap on his pitches, and we can’t assume he’s going to be quite that good again. All this is to say that he does look like the SP1 on DK, but we do again see the situation where pricing is sharper on FD, and I like this next group enough that I will not be going too far out of my way to get over the field on Kershaw tonight on FD. I’ll just hope that the Braves are enough tougher on him that he has merely a very good start, instead of a slate breaking start. The next two pitchers on the list have much better matchups than Kershaw and help to make this an interesting discussion.
Sean Manaea has struck out 13 batters with three walks in his first 13 innings as a Padre, and he’s been over 85 pitches in both starts. At the worst, this is a very good pitcher who had a 25.7% K rate with just 5.4% walks last season. At best, he improves on that and steps into the next tier where the Nola’s of the world reside. Either way, a start at home against the Reds puts him right up next to Kershaw for me tonight. There are only two batters in the projected lineup against him with strikeout rates under 20% and everything about this matchup is hands down better than Kershaw’s.