MLB DFS Top Stacks: Opening Day, March 30
Alex Sonty walks you through the top stacks for the upcoming MLB main slate. Should we eat the chalk? Which team is a good pivot? Where can we find leverage? Find out below!
MLB DFS is complex. Most articles on MLB DFS picks are about the individual players most likely to succeed on any given day, but the MLB DFS picks most likely to succeed aren’t always the MLB DFS picks we should be most likely to play.
In this space, we will be looking at the MLB DFS process over the MLB DFS picks. And we’re looking at teams over individual players, using the features of the RotoGrinders Top Stacks tool. We’ll still look at the player projections available in LineupHQ, but we’ll be more focused on the collective ownership, optimal scores, and matchups of full stacks within the context of game selection and leverage.
Right out of the gate, we should note that Opening Day is challenging. It’s every team’s best pitcher on the hill, so we get a flood of aces. On this Opening Day Main Slate, we have 22 starters — 8-10 of them are legitimate aces we’ll want to play throughout the season and another half dozen or so who are just tough nuts to crack. But there are cracks in the armors of a few. The only question is whether or not we can stack against them with leverage.
Top Projection — Braves vs. Patrick Corbin
Patrick Corbin might not be the worst pitcher on the slate, but his 11.0% barrel rate allowed in 2022 is the highest on the slate and his 1.59 HR/9 is the second highest on the slate. The Braves lineup is projected to be the top-owned play on the slate but is jam-packed with power and speed from top to bottom, so there’s no shortage of ways to play them. Also, their lead in projected ownership is not by much.
In single-entry contests and small fields, look for Ronald Acuna, Matt Olson, Austin Riley, Sean Murphy, and Ozzie Albies ownerships to balloon, as the highest projected team’s ownership greatly inflates in these fields. This is where we’ll need to look more toward Marcell Ozuna, Michael Harris, Travis d’Arnaud, and even Orlando Arcia. That is, if we even choose to go this route, of course.
In the larger fields, we shouldn’t ignore ownership, but we have them at under 12%. So we can play them with some reckless abandon at high exposure. We can go overweight without spending 30% of our lineups on them, as we would to get overweight on true chalk.