CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings - MLB DFS Strategy: Tuesday, July 26th
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Happy Tuesday! Last night was as nonsense as advertised with one of the lowest scoring slates we’ve seen all year, but we should get a chance to make up for that tonight. We’ve got better pitching options, better hitting options, and hopefully better everything.
Tuesday Night Pitching
These Are Aces
Shane McClanahan at Orioles – 35.7% K, 4.6% BB, 1.71 ERA, 2.20 SIERA
Carlos Rodon at Diamondbacks – 30.8% K, 8.3% BB, 2.95 ERA, 3.18 SIERA
Aaron Nola vs Braves – 28.1% K, 3.3% BB, 3.13 ERA, 2.88 SIERA
Spencer Strider at Phillies – 37.9% K, 10% BB, 3.03 ERA, 2.57 SIERA
These four skill sets are a sight for sore eyes after yesterday’s nonsense. We have the two highest strikeout rates in the league from McClanahan and Strider, one of the most consistent aces in Nola, and a 30% strikeout pitcher with upside in Rodon.
Looking at the numbers and the consistency from start to start, Shane McClanahan is the ace among aces. He has 12 straight quality starts, with at least 7+ strikeouts in 11 of them, and no more than 2 walks or 2 earned runs in any of them. This is as good as it gets, and in my book, there is no reasonable argument against him being the best pitcher in MLB this season. He’s priced accordingly on FD, where I’ll say he’s my SP1, but I can make a case to skip down to the next guys in this tier. On DK, he’s not priced accordingly, and he is my very easy SP1.
Aaron Nola is great, and Carlos Rodon is sometimes great. With Rodon, it doesn’t take much digging at all to see why he’s not McClanahan. He doesn’t have the control or the consistency, but he absolutely does have the upside. The way I see this is that McClanahan puts up 25-35 DK points every single start, while Rodon has topped 20 just once in last five starts. We need an outlier from Rodon to match the usual from McClanahan. This makes Rodon a deep tournament pivot only for me.
Nola has an interesting matchup here. There is always power risk from Atlanta, but it’s a high strikeout matchup with most of the Braves best hitters being righties, which favors Nola. Nola has 7+ innings in eight consecutive starts, and those extra innings effectively raise his strikeout rate above Rodon. I have Nola well ahead of Rodon as my SP2 on this slate, and my SP1 on FD assuming I need those $1,000 for my bats that it would take to get to McClanahan.