Daily Fantasy Strategy — April 23 — For Draftstreet

So, it’s the day after #JoseFernandezDay. It’s so unfortunate that we’re only treated to one, or if we’re really lucky, two of those per week. Unfortunately, we can’t have nice things. The baseball gods knew Fernandez’s next start was today, so apparently they decided us mortals shouldn’t be treated to a Chris Sale start as well.

Yesterday Jeff wrote a fantastic piece about Charlie Blackmon. While writing said piece, he noticed that more than a few Rockies’ batters had cut their strikeout rates. Or in other words, the Rockies are making more contact. So I began wondering which pitching staffs have allowed the most and least contact so far.

Team	O-Contact%	Z-Contact%	Contact%
Braves	59.6%	84.3%	75.5%
Nationals	62.5%	83.8%	75.6%
Pirates	59.8%	84.9%	75.7%
Mariners	55.8%	85.5%	76.0%
Dodgers	61.7%	85.3%	77.0%

Not surprisingly, the Nationals haven’t allowed a lot of contact. As if you needed another reason to like their staff. The Braves topping the list somewhat shocked me, considering that like Washington, they’re down a key rotation piece. I expected the Dodgers to be here, with Kershaw, I wasn’t sure they’d be here without him, so good for them. The Mariners and Pirates are also interesting. If only Paxton and Walker could be healthy at the same time.

Team	O-Contact%	Z-Contact%	Contact%
Twins	72.0%	90.9%	84.7%
Orioles	69.5%	89.2%	83.5%
Astros	68.5%	88.7%	81.8%
Rangers	66.8%	89.3%	81.4%
White Sox	66.9%	89.3%	81.4%

*Insert Twins jokes here.* Mostly teams that were projected to be bad are in the bottom five. The Rangers’ rotation does have Yu Darvish, but aside from him and the injured Derek Holland, they don’t miss a ton of bats.

This information could be meaningless, or it might be helpful given the fact that Draftstreet deducts points from your score every time one of your offensive pick strikes out. Onto the picks.

The Daily Five

Blue Jays stack

Edwin Encarnacion – $7,142
Melky Cabrera – $7,784
Colby Rasmus – $4,951

I’m not sold that Chris Tillman’s homer issues are solved, so I’m banking on a little regression to the mean today. Edwin finally left the yard last night. And for that, four of my fantasy teams rejoiced. Hopefully he has another in him today.

Nathan Eovaldi – $14,371

Eovaldi has been phenomenal to start the season. Today he gets a Braves’ lineup that is fresh off of a 15 strikeout performance, thanks to the aforementioned Jose Fernandez. The Braves do have the ability to leave the yard a few times, but their penchant for swinging and missing makes them an extremely interesting play today.

Jonathan Niese – $12,679

St. Louis, like Atlanta, also has the lineup to erupt, but they’ve been pretty terrible versus left handed pitching so far (.229 wOBA). At his price, Neise doesn’t have to do a whole lot to be a worthwhile buy.

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