MLB DFS Top Stacks: Sunday, April 23
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. Still, we’ll be more focused on collective ownership, optimal scores, and matchups of full stacks within the context of game selection and leverage.
This isn’t a pitching article, but let’s not ignore that Jacob deGrom is on the hill for $11k against the putrid A’s of Oakland (for now). That so many of us will be paying this price tag will have us also looking for salary savers, which means that a lot of us will looking at the same salary savers. It’s easier to say that we’ll just play deGrom and be different elsewhere because $11k restricts how different we can be. In this space, we don’t just look at which stacks can give us leverage but examine whether or not we can find leverage within the highest projected teams.
Chalk Stack – Twins
The models were late to the party on Patrick Corbin being a bum, but now that they’ve joined the party, the team that gets to face him is chalk every fifth day.
Today, the Twins get to face Corbin’s slate-leading 1.56 HR/9 since 2022 (and his 10.6% barrel rate allowed is the highest among the pitchers with at least 100.0 IP). A pOWN-indifferent run of the optimizers with full stacks is gonna tell us to play deGrom with the Twins and figure out the rest later. On DK, deGrom with Grayson Rodriguez and the Twins.
This is a mistake.
Sure, we want to play Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa, but this is stacking chalk on top of chalk. Complete the stack with Jorge Polanco and Donovan Solano and we should really question what the hell we’re doing here at all. Stacking the chalk team with the chalk stack isn’t terrible when we full-stack, but we have to scrutinize our goals here. What do we seek to accomplish by such foolish play? How do we escape it?
First, Polanco is back from a nagging knee injury and not hitting up in the order, yet. He has a lot of XBH power, but crossing him off is fine. It’s baseball.
Second, this Solano leading off thing is cheap, but everyone’s gonna play it for the cheap volume. He’s just not really good, so we don’t have to go there.
Third, we can pivot over to the big power of Ryan Jeffers who has had a 12.6% barrel rate since 2022 in 264 PAs. He’s not cheapity-cheap-cheap, but he’s affordable and being in the ~$3k range on both sites keeps his ownership low. There’s also holding our noses and sticking Michael A. Taylor into our stacks. Not great, but he has good game power on contact and this is a high-power, high-contact situation.
Playing the Twins with chalk pitching still requires more work. We can’t just pivot from Polanco-Solano to Jeffers-Taylor and have enough leverage to win a tournament, but it’s a start.