MLB $400K Grand Slam Review: Friday, July 21st
The Grinder review series will provide the reader with a breakdown of the exposures of “top of the leaderboard” players, the top single-entry lineup, and a comparison between all single-entry lineups and professionals for large slate DraftKings GPPs.
This week, we looked at the $400K Grand Slam [$100K to 1st!] on DraftKings with a buy-in of $444 and maximum entry limit of 30 lineups per person.
Multi-Entry Grinders of the Game
With Chris Sale facing a low strikeout and swinging strike team in the Angels, bric75 narrowed in on Max Scherzer as his expensive pitcher on the slate. For his mid-range options, he went to the ever popular Jeff Samardzija and Aaron Nola who were both looking to be involved in low scoring affairs against strikeout prone teams. With only 10 lineups, he honed in on KC and PIT as two highly projected run totals with KC bats near bare minimum salary and PIT in Colorado against Hoffman who had been shelled at home. The field reflected that same sentiment as Brandon Moss was owned at a 40.2% rate, Salvador Perez at 25.4%, and Ramon Torres at 31.2%. Bric took home a 2nd place finish and featured a 60% cash rate overall.
Reztes757 may have seen the KC overload coming and decided to hedge altogether on the chalk options. He slotted in Yu Darvish into 85% of his 20 lineups and followed him up with Steven Matz, Zack Godley, and Trevor Cahill. While not breaking the bank on the top pitching options, but siding with multiple mid-range options, he was only able to fill out his batting order with a few Rockies and instead relied on the Pirates, Indians, and Reds. The Pirates call was kind to him as he banked a 2nd place tie with Bric75 and added 9th and 14th place finished to boot.
Youdacao decided to roll with Sale as he hadn’t had a game below 16 DK points all season and was still projected to shut down the Angels to a 3.1 run projected total. The decision panned out and achieved more than just a safe pick, trailing only Yu Darvish in raw points for pitchers with 31.90 and combining with 47% of Aaron Nola to give him up to 63.45 points from pitching in some lineups. While he played a few Royals, he favored the popular Pirates and filled in the remaining gaps with the White Sox, Reds, and Athletics. Given the success of the Pirates in Coors field, it was no surprise to see youdacao finish with 12th, 19th, 20th, and 27th place finishes. He cashed on 18 of his 30 lineups, but fell short of the serious money within the top-5.
Single-Entry Winner of the Game
Cbs847 took down the whole enchilada with his only lineup enroute to a six-figure payday. Mike Fiers had Baltimore stifled as he only allowed 1 run through 7 and shut down any notion of their 5.2 projected total (although they did come back with 5 runs in the 9th to make it a game). Cbs backed him up with the Houston bats who totaled 8 runs, with 26 through the low-owned (2.6%) Colin Moran batting in 9th place. He once again went deep into the order to take Jordy Mercer at 0.5% ownership and batting 8th. Nevertheless, cbs found the a few of the peaks in each team with Josh Bell (29) and Alex Gordon (21).
Single-Entry vs. bric75/reztes757/youdacao
Out of 1001 entries in play, 22.1% of those entries were entered courtesy of players using a single bullet. The table below compares the exposures of those single entries to the above multi-entry grinders and 70 other top professionals picked off of RotoGrinders’ leaderboard:
