CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings: Tuesday, August 31st
Happy Tuesday! We’ve got a slate similar to yesterday with a lot of good pitching, which also leads to a condensed and fairly obvious group of top offenses. In glancing at the pricing, I see a couple clear paths on DK that seem likely to lead to some chalky lineup constructions. But, let’s dig in and see if that holds up upon further inspection.
Tuesday Night Pitching
Six Aces
Walker Buehler vs Braves – 27.1% K, 6.4% BB, 2.02 ERA, 3.61 SIERA
Lance McCullers at Mariners – 27.8% K, 11% BB, 3.32 ERA, 3.95 SIERA
Brandon Woodruff at Giants – 29.9% K, 6.3% BB, 2.38 ERA, 3.28 SIERA
Lucas Giolito vs Pirates – 28.3% K, 7% BB, 3.68 ERA, 3.63 SIERA
Blake Snell at Diamondbacks – 29.7% K, 13% BB, 4.58 ERA, 4.18 SIERA
Charlie Morton at Dodgers – 28.9% K, 7.9% BB, 3.60 ERA, 3.49 SIERA
These are all very good pitchers, but at least based on full season numbers, none of them are quite at an elite enough strikeout level to stand out. Rather than meander around, let’s get straight to the tricky point here. If we zoom in and look at the past month, there is in fact one guy who jumps way out to front of the pack. And I don’t like it. It’s Blake Snell. He’s at a 37.9% K rate with 15% swinging strikes and a 2.12 ERA / 2.88 SIERA in his last five starts. He’s been over 100 pitches in four of those five, all the way up to 122 last week. I will throw in the caveat here that the 122 pitches last start is probably more of a bad thing for today, but I still don’t see any reason he wouldn’t be at 90-100 pitches here. He’s still cheap due to his rocky start to the season, and he faces an Arizona team that he has pitched well against. So, what to do, what to do. Officially, from a points per dollar perspective, he’s absolutely the SP1 on this slate, and he’s going to get the Core Play tag. But, with a capital B, this is still a guy with a 13% walk rate, and this is the 2021 version of the 2018-2019 Robbie Ray. One more little caveat – while Arizona is a real-life disaster, the numbers for this lineup are really pretty respectable against lefties. Their active roster has the 3rd highest wOBA in the league against lefties and is way down at 25th in strikeouts. They also have some very patient hitters in the lineup to mess with Snell’s pitch count. The bottom line here is that he’s too cheap, and he is the top play. But we’ve got five other aces, none of whom have 13% walk rates. I am going to start looking for reasons to avoid Snell chalk, so let’s see what that looks like.