DFS Pitching Preview: August 30, 2022

Our pitching in MLB DFS isn’t just a source of fantasy points. The price tags on pitchers make it so they dictate the freedoms and restrictions of building our lineups. Before reading this article, it’s highly suggested that you read my article, “DFS Pitching Primer,” so the concepts discussed here make more sense.

That we’re not selecting the best players. We’re constructing the lineups which carry the most leverage without sacrificing many projected fantasy points.

There is so much pitching that it’s difficult to know where to start. I usually start with the best SP1s and work my way down the value plays. Today, it’s a bit important to look at everyone in small pieces. We’re gonna cut the big pieces of fat with a santoku, feel out the meat, and then finely cut the remainder of what we’re discards with some shears.

DISCARD

First, let’s discard a bunch of guys who are just a bunch of guys:

José Ureña, Taijuan Walker, and Dane Dunning are easy to cross off on a full slate because they’re not good and face the Braves, Dodgers, and Astros.

Erick Fedde and Chris Archer are bad mixes of no strikeouts with a lot of walks.

Mitch Keller has a decent strikeout matchup, but the Brewers pack a lot of punch. A pitcher having baked-in strikeouts is necessary to combat them. Otherwise, we see a lot of contact and therefore opportunities for splash plays.

Marcus Stroman is a good real-life pitcher, but the Jays are off-limits enough for our purposes. They don’t strike out much and Stroman doesn’t strike many guys out as it is.

Brady Singer is a tough one to cut because the White Sox power hasn’t shown up this year. The problem is his salary. This is just way too much to spend on both sites for him when we see the wealth of other options.

SP1 — Nola, Gausman, Kirby

On FanDuel, Aaron Nola and Kevin Gausman are the primary targets with George Kirby as the premier spend-down option. Sure, Kirby is $9.2k, but we won’t need to go lower than that.

Nola gets a bad Diamondbacks bunch. Their projected lineup’s wOBA against right-handed pitching is only .301 this season. Autoplay, right?

Sure, Nola has the best SIERA on the slate since 2021 (3.07) and 10.57 K/9 to go with it, but the Diamondbacks’ striekout rate against righties is only 20.1%. Personally, I don’t care because Nola’s strikeouts are baked-in. But Kevin Gausman and George Kirby draw strong strikeout matchups, if we wanna pivot off of the best pitcher in Nola.

Gausman comes into tonight with 10.54 K/9 since 2021 against a Cubs projected lineup with a 23.8% striekout rate against righties. That isn’t high levels of sexytime, but enough for a guy like Gausman to have a ceiling game of seven or eight innings with double-digit strikeouts.

Kirby has the DFS cheat code — righty against the Tigers. His strikeout stuff isn’t dynamic, but he gets over a strikeout-per-inning and the Tigers projected lineup has a 25.3% strikeout rate against righties with a putrid .269 wOBA and a .100 ISO. To say that Kirby is the safest pitcher on the slate is an understatement and I hate citing safety in DFS. We can totally spend down on him at FanDuel and play him at SP2 on DraftKings, going overweight on both sites.

It isn’t that I believe Kirby is the best play. Nola is. But the Kirby price tag allows us to play whoever we want.

On FanDuel, it’s really difficult to pivot away from these three.

SP2 — Fried, Giolito, Taillon, Manning

Max Fried is a deceptively hard-throwing, supersolid real-life pitcher. He draws the terrible Rockies and has excellent command and power prevention. He just hasn’t found his strikeouts, yet, and the Rockies don’t strike out much. Too expensive for a one-pitcher state, the price is just in that range of too high to wanna stomach but just right to spend up to be contrarian, as everyone going double-stud might avoid Fried. That said, early ownership looks high; I just expect for it to come down.

If you wanna get swampy, Lucas Giolito has been really bad at everything this year, but he does face a Royals project lineup with a .290 wOBA, a .130 ISO, and a 23.4% strikeout rate against righties. Giolito isn’t blowing anyone away these days, but he has the leash to get double-digit strikeouts in seven innings. Near $9k, we can scoff at this, but $8.2k is a palatable price to take a risk on an otherwise unpalatable pitcher.

The Angels projected lineup has scary pieces, but they — as a whole — are below average and coming into tonight with a 27.3% strikeout rate against righties. Jameson Taillon isn’t in a nut spot between Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, and a hitters’ park, but he is in the nut spot to compile strikeouts at a very affordable price.

But if we’re just looking for the cheapest palatable pitcher, we should probably look to Matt Manning. He had a very rough first 100 innings to start his career, but he’s gone six-plus innings in three of his last four starts, generating a 2.17 FIP, 9.36 K/9, 1.80 BB/9, and only 0.36 HR/9 over 25.0 innings through those last four. The Mariners are a tough bunch, so the matchup isn’t in his favor, but that’s baked into the low price tag. I don’t love recency bias, but it can sometimes be useful to not miss out on a potential rising star.

MORE DISCARDS

Logan Webb and Andrew Heaney are very good pitchers in different ways. They’re also both priced over $9k. They both have very tough matchups at those prices, so it’s just the wrong slate for them.

Framber Valdez has a deceptively tough matchup in the Rangers and struggles mightily with control, so his ceiling is capped.

Blake Snell is a guy who I just can’t… The strikeouts are super-sexy and baked in, but his command is awful on purpose. Which scares me against the Giants. They’re less patient this season, it’s a great ballpark for pitching, and this isn’t a terrible price tag, but it would take a cheaper tag to take me off of the pitchers we’ve already mentioned. Snell isn’t bad. He just isn’t good enough tonight.

Speaking of not good enough tonight, Zac Gallen is really expensive and going against a really tough Phillies lineup. We just don’t have to embrace this sort of adversity in our lives.

Kutter Crawford is cheap as hell, but we might rather actually attack the Yankees with Mike Mayers. Neither should project well and we could realistically flip a coin here as to how we spend down so low, but I have to stress that we can go down to Manning and have more upside in terms of volume and, therefore, total strikeouts.

If Jason Alexander had some K/9, we could play him for free against the Pirates, but 4.75 is nauseating.

Finally, there’s Cole Irvin, who comes with no strikeouts, but he only has 1.64 BB/9, faces a terribad Nationals bunch, and could get innings with his great command against a bad team. He’s just a bit too expensive. Going back to: why not just play Matt Manning?