MLB DFS Top Stacks: Sunday, July 9
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.
It’s Sunday, which means an afternoon full of baseball. This is also the last slate before the All-Star break with 4 MLB DFS-free days to follow. So, if you were thinking of taking today off, perhaps you should reconsider. We’ve got 10 games on the board here and a slew of talented starting pitchers. Stacking against some of the better pitchers will probably be necessary by default, but that should also help to create an edge.
Which teams should we be stacking?
Chalkish Stack – Red Sox vs. JP Sears
The Red Sox will play the finale of their home series against the A’s this afternoon, which means we should get a third straight day of Boston’s bats as semi-chalk. I don’t think the numbers will be as gaudy as they were on Friday night, but it’s still one of the better hitting environments on the slate. Fenway tops the charts in terms of hitter’s parks today with no Coors, and they’ll take their hacks against the homer-prone JP Sears.
Sears has already yielded 19 homers through 17 starts this season, which puts him among the league leaders in that category. This guy also pitches half of his games in the cavernous Oakland Coliseum, so Fenway is a massive park downgrade. The A’s bullpen behind him is also fairly taxed after they had to use 6 pitchers to get through yesterday’s bullpen game after Paul Blackburn was scratched.
Sears isn’t otherwise terrible, of course. His 23% strikeout rate is decent enough alongside good control, but a 12% barrel rate combined with a hefty 57% flyball rate will naturally lead to some dongs.
Of those 19 big flies, 17 have been slugged by right-handed hitters, but Sears’ strikeout numbers are actually considerably lower vs. LHBs. As a result, I’m not at all scared away from Boston’s lefty-heavy lineup against him. Justin Turner, Adam Duvall, and Rob Refsnyder are headliners with the platoon advantage in a park that plays up righty power, but you can still look to Rafael Devers and Masataka Yoshida with confidence in the lefty-lefty spot.
As has been the case all weekend, the Red Sox salaries make them easily stackable. Devers is still the only truly expensive bat on either site, while the sub-$3,000 Refsnyder should be very popular assuming he hits out of the leadoff spot. Yu Chang and Enrique Hernandez are a couple more cheap RHBs with some thump.
Boston should be the chalkiest stack of the slate, but I don’t think they’ll be so chalky that they’re necessarily a -EV stack. They’re coming in around 13% stack ownership in our PlateIQ projections on both DraftKings and FanDuel. Their opto% is actually hovering around 14% on FD, while it’s down to about 8% on DK. On aggregate, the price points are a bit friendlier for the Sox on FanDuel.
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