MLB $750K MidSummer Classic Review: Tuesday, July 26th
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 $750K MidSummer Classic [$150K to 1st!] on DraftKings with a buy-in of $333.
Multi-Entry Grinders of the Game
As with the other highlighted multi-entry players in this article, Assani didn’t get too crazy owning any single player as the relatively small size of the tournament suited a spread out approach. More importantly though was the teams that saw elevated combined ownerships. His most highly owned team was Toronto, followed by Boston, Baltimore, Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee, and Oakland. However, it was one of his lower owned stacks in the Los Angeles Angels (5 player stack), combined with some mix and match players, who rewarded him with a 2nd place finish.
Ehafner on the other hand, focused more so on the San Francisco Giants and Milwaukee Brewers. The lack of Skaggs limited his overall ownership of the high priced bats of Boston and Toronto, but this did not stop him from taking down 6th place as Bud Norris filled in just fine alongside his Cincinnati/Milwaukee stack. The lowly owned CIN, MIL, and LAA bats could be seen throughout most of the top lineups.
TheClone even spread out his ownership further than ehafner or Assani, with only 1 team (Boston) owned at a significant clip higher than the others (Boston: 77% combined; BAL, CHC, MIL, MIN, OAK all between ~35-50%). As many of his lineups fell victim to the poor performances by Francisco Liriano and Danny Salazar, he only posted one top 25 finish, but made it count with a 3rd place MIL/LAA stack.
Single-Entry Winner of the Game
AmateurHr took down first place and made a statement doing so, as he clobbered Assani by 12 points. The key to his lineup was getting value at cheap pitching which allowed him to pay up for a number of expensive bats. Choosing which bats would go off in a few different games is insanely rare, which is why 8 of the other 9 teams in the top 10 featured 4+ player team stacks. However, when everything goes right, as AmateurHr demonstrated, you can really hit it out of the park.
Single-Entry vs. Assani/ehafner/TheClone
Out of 2500 entries in the MidSummer Classic, 585 of those entries (23.4%) were entered courtesy of players using a single bullet. The table below compares the exposures of those single entries to the exposures of Assani, ehafner, TheClone, and 40 other top professionals picked off of RotoGrinders’ leaderboard:
