MLB $500K Fastball Championship Review: Tuesday, August 23rd
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 and massive prize pool GPPs.
Today we looked at the $500K Fastball Championship [$100K to 1st!] on DraftKings with a buy-in of $33.
Multi-Entry Grinders of the Game
On one of the more popular stacks of the day, Assani favored the Cubs in majority of his 150 lineups (seeing almost 80% ownership across the board). With only 5 runs on the day, a full Cubs stack didn’t launch anyone into contention for a win, but their 10 hits were mostly concentrated between Kris Bryant, Ben Zobrist, and Addison Russell. This production, along with outstanding outings from Arrieta and Gray, was enough to let Assani hit a cash rate of 82.7%, but left him without a top-50 finish.
Awesemo took an alternate approach with ownership split between TOR, CHC, STL, CWS, ARI, and ATL in decreasing ownership. Again, solid pitching helped bolstered a core of points throughout a majority of his lineups. However, most of his damage was done with a solid Chicago White Sox core of Tim Anderson, Melky Cabrera, and Adam Eaton.
Stlcardinals84 followed the same approach as Assani, but instead chose the White Sox over the Cubs. With the savings in salary, stlcardinals84 took a fateful turn and rostered Madison Bumgarner at a 90% clip in a down game. Due to the deep ownership of White Sox, he still cashed in 64% of his lineups and even landed a 20th place finish with a Arrieta/Gray combination.
Single-Entry Winner of the Game
Without a single full team stack hitting it out of the park, Sm1tty was able to pick some of the best of the best performances of the night to take down a 2nd place finish. He mixed in a number of chalk plays with low owned, high-ISO power plays. However, the crux of his lineup featured a 2HR break-out performance from Gregory Polanco and Ivan Nova’s first complete game of the year (dominating the Astros).
Single-Entry vs. Assani/Awesemo/Stlcardinals84
Out of 17,516 entries in the Fastball Championship, 3949 of those entries (22.5%) were entered courtesy of players using a single bullet. The table below compares the exposures of those single entries to the exposures of Assani, Awesemo, stlcardinals84, and 40 other top professionals picked off of RotoGrinders’ leaderboard:
