Matt Shoemaker Daily Fantasy News, Rankings, Projections

Two interesting matchups to examine using PlateIQ are pitchers with opposing philosophies concerning location. Jake Odorizzi loves to live up in the zone and on the outside, throwing lots of splitters and cutters off his primary fastball. Josh Donaldson and Jose Bautista have both liked those upper areas, especially this season, while Bautista especially has excelled against splitters and cutters over the last two years, supporting the duos high exit velocity and success against this fly ball pitcher. In Los Angeles, Matt Shoemaker emphasized the splitter/changeup as well to live down and away to batters from either side. Those pitches along with the location appears to be right in Gary Sanchez's wheelhouse, while Aaron Judge has handled the low pitch well, but not as much on the outside part of the plate. Another batter who seems to match up well with Shoemaker's arsenal is Brett Gardner, who's hot spots correspond on the heat map with some success against splitters as well.

Matt Shoemaker has the highest SwStr% (13.6) on the board over the last month for anyone with more than three starts and has been above 11% in each of those five starts, but allows a lot of hard contact in the air and faces the top offense in baseball. He’s allowed 13 HRs pitching in a power suppressing park and has only even pitched in one power friendly park this season with road starts in Miami, Tampa Bay, Seattle, Houston, Kansas City and Oakland. He allowed two HRs in that last start in Houston. Tonight, he faces a lineup without a top bat in George Springer, but we know he likes to throw that splitter down below the zone (whether he gets there often enough is another question), so we should be able to use PlateIQ to see if there are any strong matchups here. While the Splitter is not a common pitch with small sample sizes over the last two years for hitters, only the last four batters in the lineup have a below average Hit% against the pitch over the last two seasons. However, Josh Reddick, Carlos Correa, Brian McCann, Marwin Gonzalez, Alex Bregman and even Nori Aoki and Jake Marisnick match up well low in the zone where Shoemaker likes to ideally be with Brian McCann perhaps matching up best, excelling where Shoemaker likes to work lefties, down and away.

The five most popular players on either site are projected to be Cubs tonight with Schwarber, Russell, Rizzo, Happ and Bryant all expected to be in 20% or more of lineups. The easiest place to diversify might be First Base with several players projected for big nights according to RotoGrinders Player Projections an Freddie Freeman projected to be in 10% of lineups or fewer on either site and Wil Myers (1%) grabbing the top Contrarian Rating (ContR) on either site. Matt Shoemaker and Michael Pineda are projected to be the most popular arms with Jhoulys Chacin a surprising third, no doubt due to Milwaukee's high strikeout rate and potential injury situation (Braun DL, both Shaw & Thames out of games this week). Michael Fulmer and Gerrit Cole could be more contrarian plays. Each has a tough opponent, but have been pitching well. Premium subscribers can find potential ownership rates on the Projected Ownership page.

Chris Sale has struck out at least 10 batters in four straight starts and tops the RotoGrinders Daily K Predictor with a projection of 8.98 tonight, trailed by Carlos Martinez by a bit more than half a strikeout (8.34). While Martinez has certainly shown upside, he's been more erratic with a few more red flags (decreased ground ball rate, more walks, hard contact), which can be an issue against a powerful and patience Milwaukee offense, but one that also strikes out a lot (25.9% vs RHP). A cheaper source of strikeouts could be Trevor Cahill tonight (29.1 K%, 14.1 SwStr%). He costs just $5K on DraftKings, a perfect SP2 compliment to someone like Sale ($12.5K) and is projected above Jon Lester and Matt Shoemaker on the K Predictor.

Matt Shoemaker is off to a relatively uninspiring start to his 2017 campaign after failing to pitch past the fifth inning in both starts this season, cumulating in a brutal outing his last time out, allowing seven runs (six earned) in just 4.1 innings pitched against the Seattle Mariners. A huge reason for his struggles is an astronomical 11.9% walk rate, which is significantly higher than the 4.5% walk rate he posted last season. When you combine the walks and an oddly low 11.9% strikeout rate, it's not surprising to see why Shoemaker has struggled the early going. On the positive side, Shoemaker has induced an 11.0% swinging strike rate through two starts, which is basically in line with his career mark, meaning we can expect his strikeout rate to begin to normalize towards the 21.4% he posted in 2016. Conveniently, he draws a matchup with a Kansas City Royals squad that is striking out at a 23.4% clip versus right-handed pitching thus far, which is currently good for eighth-worst in the league. On a five-game slate, it's difficult to say any stack is out of play, but the Royals stack certainly checks in towards the bottom of the list given their overall lack of power throughout the order. Mike Moustakas (139 wRC+ .375 wOBA, .310 ISO vs RHP in 2016/17) appears to be the biggest threat for Shoemaker to work around given his low 12.9% strikeout rate versus right-handed pitching the last two seasons, while Brandon Moss (.302 ISO vs RHP) is a more boom or bust one-off option with his massive 30.4% strikeout rate to right-handed pitching last season (38.7% in 2017). That is, of course, if siding with the Royals side of this matchup in tournaments, which is not the recommended optimal strategy.

Matt Shoemaker has a 22.0 K-BB% at home that’s nearly double his 11.7% mark on the road, but has struck out just nine of his last 56 at home and five or fewer in each of his last seven starts overall. He’s gone at least six innings in each start, allowing HRs in just two of them, so he hasn’t completely reverted to his old ways, but expectations should be lowered a bit. He's in a nice spot against the visiting Reds though. It's a significant park downgrade for them and his 13.4 K% over the last month still comes with an optimistic 10.5 SwStr%, though that too is down a bit. It has been above 12% in each of his last two home starts and $7.2K on DraftKings gives you a potentially high upside arm with plenty of room for offense or a higher priced pitcher. There's no interest in Cincinnati bats on the road in one of the few negative run environments in play tonight.

Matt Shoemaker is a pitcher that can be more than viable in tournaments since he has high upside against a Blue Jays team with the largest strikeout rate in all of baseball over the past month (25.9% K%). On the flip side, Shoemaker has allowed 1.35 HR/9 in his career to right-handed batters despite having good strikeout and walk rates. This season, all of his advanced stats have been respectable against right-handed batters except for home runs (1.47 HR/9). We shouldn't be all that interested in stacking against Shoemaker, as his low walks and potential for dominant starts make him one of the tougher pitchers to load up against. But, any of Edwin Encarnacion (.283 ISO), Josh Donaldson (.272 ISO), Troy Tulowitzki (.223 ISO) and Russell Martin (.179 ISO) are tournament plays given their power upside and the long ball tendency of Shoemaker.

Even after a rough stretch over the last month or so, the pitching profile of Matt Shoemaker is still fairly solid, as his SIERA sits at 3.89. If we remove that stretch, he has obviously been much better than his SIERA would indicate. Shoemaker provides more than decent strikeout upside in this matchup, as his strikeout rate sits at 21.5% on the season to go along with an elite 13.0% SwStr%. Shoemaker has been really good against left-handed batters, which should work in his favor against this lefty-heavy Seattle lineup. Shoemaker should make for a good contrarian tournament play in tournaments, as the masses may just write him off straight away after taking a peak at Seattle's season-long stats versus right-handed pitching. This could be a mistake in which we can capitalize.