CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings: Opening Day
Hello World! Happy Opening Day, and welcome to the 2021 Million Dollar Musings. Before we jump in to the Opening Day slate, I want to discuss a little about what you can expect here this season. (If you want to skip right to the Opening Day slate breakdown, I will not be offended.)
When I started writing this article five years ago, the goal was to help DFS players better understand the game of baseball, what the stats mean and how to use them, and then how to incorporate that into your DFS play. This article has never been about telling you who to play, it’s teaching you how to break down a slate and make your own decisions. For those of you who have been with me either the whole time, or at least for a couple seasons, you have a firm understanding of what I look at each day and what numbers are important to me and how I use them. I am confident that you don’t need 10,000 words a day breaking down every single matchup of every player on the slate. This is partly because I’ve already taught you how I do it, but also because the other tools available on the site, specifically PlateIQ and LineupHQ, are top notch and can give you all the data you need on a slate. We’ve also got tremendous projections as well as access to Derek Carty’s The BAT and insight from Consensus Value Rankings and the Expert Survey for building your lineups.
So, what I am planning to do with the Musings this season, is to start each day with a Cliff Noted version of the slate. I will do the usual tiering of pitchers, but without necessarily walking you through every single day of a pitcher’s life up until present day. However, to make sure we stay sharp, as well as to help new readers understand the thought process, I will still be doing deep dives into certain pitchers to understand why I like them more or less than in previous seasons, or more or less than projections may suggest.
Another area of extreme change in baseball overall as well as DFS is with the shortened innings from starters, and increased importance of bullpens. The way this affects this article is that it has become tougher and less relevant to break down individual hitter matchups against the opposing starting pitcher, as at least half of most at bats are going to come against relievers. My goal with the hitters is going to be to break out different categories, giving you a bird’s eye view of the slate, rather than just droning on about so-and-so and his .348 wOBA against lefties. We’re going to look for stacks, we’re going to look for values and we’re going to look for underowned or underappreciated upside batters who may not be part of stacks. Like with the pitching, some days I will deep dive into a certain situation, while some days will be more lists and rankings.
We’ll adjust things as we go, and as always, I’m around to answer questions. One thing you can be sure of is that the Musings will continue to provide dad jokes and nonsensical references to things that have no earthly reason to belong in a fantasy baseball article.