CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings - MLB DFS Strategy: Tuesday, May 3rd
Happy Tuesday! It was another thrilling night of offensive fireworks last night…never mind, I can’t even make a joke to do it justice. Trying to figure out what MLB is doing with these baseballs reminds me of one of my favorite Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey:
‘I remember how my great-uncle Jerry would sit on the porch and whittle all day long. Once he whittled me a toy boat out of a larger toy boat I had. It was almost as good as the first one, except now it had bumpy whittle marks all over it. And no paint, because he had whittled off all the paint.’
Tuesday Night Pitching
We’ve got another pretty good pitching slate, where I’m seeing a couple different tiers. At first glance, I expect to be able to narrow things down to a reasonable sized pool, but let’s dig in and see what happens.
ACES
Carlos Rodon at Dodgers
Brandon Woodruff vs Reds
Alek Manoah vs Yankees
Julio Urias vs Giants
Joe Ryan at Orioles
Michael Kopech at Cubs
The first big decision point on this slate comes right out of the gate with Carlos Rodon and his 43% strikeout rate facing the Dodgers. I’ve seen enough from Rodon to say he is very clearly the most talented pitcher on this slate, which means it will all come down to the matchup. Rather than just answering the Rodon question in a vacuum, let’s look at the rest of this top tier and see what we find, then loop back to Rodon.
Brandon Woodruff has simply not been the same pitcher so far this year. Three straight seasons of at least 29% strikeouts and 6% walks have turned to a 23% K rate with 9.6% walks through four starts. It’s very subtle, but his velocity is still down a slight tick from usual, although it’s so small that doesn’t bother me. Over his last two starts, both against the Pirates, he has seen a strikeout increase with four straight games of improvement in swinging strikes. He hasn’t been hit particularly hard, and he has two games he gave up a bunch of runs and two where he went scoreless. Folks, I don’t know. My lean here is that he’s fine and we’ve got a guy going 95 pitches who, at the worst, is an average strikeout pitcher against the Reds, and at the best, is the ace we’ve seen the past three years. I’m in on DK, less so on FD.