The Daily Grind: 4-10-14 – Presented by FanDuel

Agenda

1. What is an overlay?
2. DFS Picks
3. Traditional Fantasy Friday
4. La Table

1. What is an overlay?

Many sites guarantee the payout of their common, daily tournaments. When a tournament doesn’t fill, the money is still guaranteed, but there are fewer people competing for it. Yesterday, FanDuel had a $2 Squeeze tournament that allowed up to five entries. The total payout was $2,000 but only 800-some out of over 1,000 spots filled. Usually the expected value of an entry is around. $1.90, but in this case it was 2.38. That’s an overlay. As it happens, I netted $26 from that tournament.

2.DFS Picks

Early: There are only three games before 7:05, so you’ll have slim pickings.

Since there’s only six pitchers, let’s talk about each of them. Mike Pelfrey is the only guy who’s blatantly stackable. He faces the A’s. Tom Koehler and Travis Wood are more mediocre than exploitable, but you’ll probably have to pick one of them. Dan Straily would usually fit that group, but he’s facing the terrible Twins offense. That leaves us with Gerrit Cole and Stephen Strasburg as the upper crust.

Don’t forget, rain in Chicago could produce wonky results.

Late: Here’s a more normal slate of six games. Notice the variety of stacking options. I don’t think Clay Buchholz is all the way back, which means the Yankees’ lefty stack is alive and well today.

Once again, the Blue Jays have a great matchup at home. They take on lefty Dallas Keuchel.

The platoon-happy Indians take on John Danks. He was fine the last time out, but I want to see sustained success before I change my opinion of him.

Randall Delgado against Ryan Vogelsong is almost stacker heaven. Unfortunately, the pair will spin their wares in San Francisco.

3.Traditional Fantasy

To Start: I’ll tentatively point out that Carlos Carrasco has a solid matchup against the White Sox tomorrow. He wasn’t the best in his first outing and will be opposed by Chris Sale. So don’t jump on him unless you need the start.

Dillon Gee and Tyler Skaggs could see a lot of time in this column. I’m not sure about either one tomorrow. They each really need to look out for one hitter.

Rick Porcello has a great matchup against San Diego. The Padres have really struggled on offense, so Porcello should like both the offense and the park.

To Exploit: I don’t like Dustin McGowan or Bud Norris as starters. I think the pair will cough up half a dozen runs by the fourth inning. Where it goes from there, I don’t know.

Bruce Chen versus Kyle Gibson is hard to predict. We could be looking at a lot of runs or very few. We’ll see I guess, but I lean towards exploiting both of them.

4. Table

The table below indicates which stadiums have the best conditions for hitters today. The color coding is a classic stoplight where green equals go for hitters. The weather conditions are from SI Weather’s home run app. A 10/10 means great atmospheric conditions for home runs. A 1/10 means lousy atmospheric conditions.

There might be rain during the Cubs game. There probably won’t, but there might. I worry about these sorts of things. Besides, that game isn’t a great target.

The Link. There are four good stadium plays for hitters today, three of which have nice weather. There’s one obvious pitchers haven, unfortunately Delgado and Vogelsong can’t be trusted.

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