Daily Fantasy Strategy — April 16 — For Draftstreet

Jesse Chavez has been mentioned a lot on Fangraphs lately. Wiers mentioned him in the Roto Riteup yesterday. Cistulli dug a little deeper, and even added a few gifs later on in the day. Chavez’s start has been impressive, but I want to shed some light on Oakland’s rotation as a whole. The Athletics lost Jarrod Parker in spring training. A.J. Griffin will be back eventually, but his timetable is still a little uncertain. All told, the Athletics had to replace two pitchers that were firmly slotted into their Opening Day rotation. They’ve done that, and then some.

Team	GS	IP	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	ERA	FIP	xFIP	WAR
Athletics	13	81	9.00	2.00	0.78	1.89	2.99	3.27	1.9
Tigers	10	63	7.86	2.43	0.43	3.00	2.81	3.69	1.6

The A’s rotation has racked up more WAR than any other team, as of Tuesday afternoon. The Tigers ranked second. They’ve played fewer games, and they’ll likely overtake Oakland considering they trot one of the three of: Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Anibal Sanchez out there more often than they don’t.

Nonetheless, Billy Beane and the rest of the front office have done a tremendous job cobbling together a formidable rotation despite injuries. Seriously, is anything cooler than watching Scott Kazmir be great in 2014 after the depths he had to come back from? Probably not; unless you include Grady Sizemore in the conversation.

Probables Chart

Due to the postponements around the league yesterday, changes have been made to certain rotations. For the most part, starters were simply pushed back a day. David Hale was the only starter actually skipped, according to MLB.com’s probable starters, so if I’m wrong please yell at them.

It’s extremely cold in Minnesota; it might snow! So, I’ll be doing my best to ignore players from that game. Miguel Gonzalez is still homer prone in Baltimore, but it’s still really cold across the northeast, so balls might not be jumping out of the yard. For today, my plan is to try to and pick as many west coast/domed stadium games to target when filling out my offense.

For the record, I highlighted Liriano versus lefties and Fernandez versus righties just to show you how good they have been against them, respectively. It’s almost unreal.

The Daily Five

Dee Gordon – $7,706

Ryan Vogelsong’s slipper finally fell off. Dee Gordon’s slipper, however, is still firmly on for the time being. I obviously don’t expect this production, or anything close to it, to continue, but we might as well acknowledge it while it’s happening.

Giants stack

Buster Posey – $7,158
Hunter Pence – $6,477
Pablo Sandoval – $5,451

On the other side of the coin in San Francisco, Paul Maholm is taking the bump. Posey is a little expensive, but Sandoval and Pence are priced very well given their platoon advantage and respective track records. Quite possibly my favorite stack of the day.

Andrew Cashner – $17,610

Cashner’s been phenomenal so far, and he’s in Petco tonight so there’s a lot to love. The Rockies’ offense can explode, so he is a little risky, but I believe he’ll be able to navigate their lineup effectively.

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