The Baseball Diaries: Thursday, July 9th
Welcome to the Baseball Diaries. This is a morning after review of my main team(s) on a designated site. I’ll go over the process that went into selecting the players, good or bad, in hopes you will find something in here that ultimately helps your team selection.
If you’re not trying to learn, then just kick back and read for the revelry. Sometimes the tilt is real…and highly entertaining for the observer. Here’s a review of my night on DraftKings.
This is a slightly different version of this article than it usually is. Typically in baseball I like to stick with safe cash games; large double ups and various head-to-heads spread out among numerous opponents. Sometimes though you need to change things up based on what you see in the slate. I like to look at the slate in the morning and see what kind of day it is. Sometimes you see several stud pitchers and you know cash games will be great tonight. Sometimes you see no stud pitchers and adjust your game selection accordingly.
In the case of last night, I looked at the evening slate and saw several teams that were premier stacks; I knew cash games would be too difficult to pin down to only only hitters, so I adjusted and went to multi-entry in tournaments solely.
Player Analysis
I did my best to squeeze Kershaw on every team I could. This 50-point game was seen coming from a mile away against this Philadelphia team. It’s been one of the few instances over the last several weeks when you could pay the big salary for the stud pitcher and actually have it pay off.
Basically, if you were going to stack a decent team last night with Kershaw, you were going to have trouble squeezing a second big pitcher on your team. I needed to find a cheap guy to pair with him. My final list brought me down to Morton, Rick Porcello and Jeremy Guthrie. I chose to roll with Morton mainly because he is a different (better) pitcher at home, and San Diego is a good team to target against in DFS.
Dodgers Stack
The Dodgers jump off the page because the team, as a whole, was fairly cheap on DraftKings. They gave you a lot of leeway. Just look at this particular team above. It’s a Dodger core stack, minus the lefty-on-lefty matchup for Adrian Gonzalez, with Kershaw and the most expensive first baseman (Paul Goldschmidt). On paper that’s a heck of a team; surrounding a stack of the best hitters on a good offensive team going against a bad pitcher.
Diamondbacks Stack
Arizona was stack worthy due to the park factor – being in a small, hitter friendly, park in Texas in the middle of the summer. They also were facing a left-handed pitcher and the Diamondbacks feature a few guys who destroy left-handers, namely Goldschmidt and Pollock. To win big GPPs though you need to nail all components, and if I had nailed that last OF spot, instead of struggling with Thomas Pham, this team could have done damage in this tournament.
Indians Stack
When I look at the pitching chart for the day and see Dan Straily as a probable, my first thought is STACK against him. He’s just not a good pitcher and makes for a solid stack candidate every time. Now, what I always preach is the big picture, and I broke that rule here. The big picture is that if Straily gets run out early and you only get a couple of at-bats against him, you’re then left for the duration of the game against one of the top bullpens in MLB. That’s NOT optimal at all.