Million Dollar Musings: Thursday, April 18th

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2019-04-18 21:41:46 Premium Content Part of the product SimLabs+

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Thursday, April 18th

Happy Thursday! We’ve got another day of split slates, with two small but interesting slates on most sites. We’ll start out bright and early with a four-game slate that starts at 12:10 ET. For the main evening slate, DraftKings and Yahoo are using the five games beginning at 7:10pm, while FanDuel and FantasyDraft will start a little earlier at 6:35pm to include the Royals-Yankees game.

I’ll be on Crunchtime tonight at 6:15pm with Roth and JSU to take a final look at the main slate. While the weather doesn’t look to be a big issue tonight, I want to thank Kevin Roth for another extremely useful forecast on a tricky slate last night. I would have skipped Jake Odorizzi last night without his confidence in that game playing.

Early Slate Pitching

Patrick Corbin vs Giants – Corbin is the easy choice at pitcher on this slate, looking every bit as good so far as he was in his breakout 2018 season. He has a 24:4 K:BB ratio in 19 innings, backing up his 30.8% K rate and 15.6% swinging strikes from last season. He’s pitching almost identically across the board, with all the strikeouts and low walks also leading to a lot of hard contact, but because of the elite K:BB ability, it’s only going to hurt him on rare occasions. The Giants are not the team I am worried about, as there just isn’t enough right-handed power to be concerning. He may not see the upper range of his strikeout ability, with four low strikeout righties in the lineup, but overall there is still plenty of upside here. Between the Giants low walks and Corbin’s control and ground balls, if he’s not piling up strikeouts, there is a clear path to some easy innings where he could back to the 7-innings that he saw in his last start. Nobody is a can’t miss in this league right now, but on a four-game slate, I would be fine to go all-in on Corbin in all formats.