MLB DFS Top Stacks: Saturday, July 8
Taylor Smith 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 look 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. Still, we’ll be more focused on collective ownership, optimal scores, and matchups of full stacks within the context of game selection and leverage.
The second Saturday of July should be a fun one rife with plenty of afternoon baseball. We’ve got 11 games to contend with on DK’s early main slate starting at 1:05 ET, while FD cut theirs down to a 7-gamer starting at 4:05 ET. For the purposes of today’s article, I’ll focus on stacks we can target on both slates. As much as I love the Cardinals today against Touki Toussaint, you can only stack ‘em on DK’s main slate.
Who else should we stack up this afternoon?
Chalk Stack – Red Sox vs. Paul Blackburn
Paul Blackburn is no gas can, especially this season. He’s also a lot better than Luis Medina, last night’s bulk pitcher for Oakland. Regardless, I still expect ownership to congregate around the Red Sox as we saw on Friday. This is a huge park downgrade for Blackburn, and Fenway is the best hitting environment on the slate.
Blackburn has ramped his K-rate all the way up to 24.5% so far this year, which is noteworthy for a guy with a career whiff rate of just under 17%. He added a cutter last year that improved his strikeout ability, and that success seems to have carried over to 2023. With more strikeouts come fewer groundballs, however. Blackburn’s current 41.7% groundball rate is the lowest of his career, and it is a steep decline from his career 49.2% mark.
Blackburn is also a reverse-splits right-hander, which could help him today against a more lefty-heavy Sox lineup. Boston is projected to have 5 LHBs in there. Blackburn’s strikeout (27.4%) and groundball (46.7%) rates are both significantly higher against lefties on the year.
It’s not a perfect spot, but the park is good, and we’ve been picking on Oakland pitchers all year. I’m not fully sold, but the value on these hitters does make them more palatable. There isn’t a single hitter in this lineup north of $5,000 on DK or $4,000 on FD, while they’ve also got a few sub-$3,000 hitters sprinkled in.
If we want to target Blackburn’s reverse split, Justin Turner and Adam Duvall are the standout right-handed hitters from a power standpoint. This lineup as a whole has done some damage against right-handed pitching (.334 wOBA, .190 ISO), and Boston does have a 5.47 total here. Blackburn may not be the same guy he used to be, but that 5.47 total suggests that oddsmakers aren’t fully ready to buy what he’s selling.
Rafael Devers (.227 ISO) is the biggest power threat from the left side, though all of Jarren Duran, Alex Verdugo, Triston Casas, and Masataka Yoshida boast some pop too. Connor Wong (.210 ISO) figures to be the most popular value catcher on today’s slate as well.
As of now, the Red Sox project for slightly negative leverage on both sites, though the margins are small. Boston’s coming in with about 10% stack ownership on DraftKings with an opto percentage of about 9.5%. The ownership (13.9%) and opto% (13%) are both higher on FanDuel.
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