The Daily Grind: 9-1-14 – Presented by FanDuel

Agenda

1. The Final Month
2. Daily DFS
3. Tuesday Picks
4. Table

1. The Final Month

I remember the month of May. I still don’t believe May was only 31 days. I felt like I wrote 110 Daily Grinds during that month. The season would never end. I’d never get a respite from waking up entirely too early to write furiously and make sure I said some actually helpful things. I’ve tried.

Now it’s September. It can be the weirdest month of baseball. DFS players will be screwed by inexplicable substitutions. Traditional fantasy owners are stuck with their roster – the trade deadline has passed in nearly every league. Now is not the time to rest on your laurels or get caught up in stupid football drafts. You’ve put too much effort into the current season to leave anything on the table now. So what if you’re a three percent long shot to win your league. Go do it anyway.

Pep talk concluded.

2. Daily DFS

Yesterday’s Grind

Early: Labor Day is scheduled like a typical Sunday – 10 of the 12 games are early. There are a LOT of really good pitchers lined up for today. Stacks are few and far between.

Jimmy Nelson versus Jacob Turner is NOT a recipe for runs. Well it could be, both pitchers can be considered unreliable at this point in their careers. They’re also two guys I expect to use some day in the future. Nelson’s numbers are good enough to make him a choice to start today, but I worry about those high octane youngsters in Chicago. Turner’s just some kind of mess this season. He seemingly has the same curse as Edwin Jackson.

Everything is going wrong for the A’s, so why not target Jason Hammel. For what it’s worth, I think he’s fine. But I’ll hedge my bets and mention him as an option.

Trevor Cahill still has a walk problem. He’s mostly done well since returning to the rotation, but anytime your walk rate and strikeout rate are similar, you’re going to run into trouble. Hence why he allowed eight runs, six earned, in his last start. He’ll face the Piddling Padres.

Franklin Morales is always a target. Doubly so at Coors Field. Triply so against a mostly right-handed lineup.

Late: Just two games are in the evening. DFSers can still play them via the “late afternoon” contest. However, you probably won’t have timely lineups.

If you want to stack against any of the late pitchers, Colby Lewis is the obvious choice. The high average Royals matchup well with the high BABIP pitcher. Of course, as I’m writing this, Andy McCullough (a Royals writer) just tweeted that the Royals can’t hit now. So maybe this isn’t a timely choice. Frankly, I never concern myself with timeliness.

3. Tuesday Picks

Pitchers to Start: If you just need a useful but unexceptional start, Jon Niese shouldn’t hurt you. Sure, he has the platoon penalty against Giancarlo Stanton, but he should be able to handle the rest of the lineup.

Derek Holland will make his season debut. He struck out a bunch of dudes in the minors, which is nice to see. You should expect some rust and poor run support.

Pitchers to Exploit: Kyle Lobstein is a 24-year-old soft-tossing lefty. Generally, those kinds of pitchers need a few extra years to develop enough wiles to consistently retire major league hitters. We’ll see how he does in Cleveland. The park is well suited to him at least.

Kyle Kendrick is usually some kind of mediocre. Earlier this year, I went to a game against the Braves in which he allowed the first two hitters to reach base and then Freddie Freeman hit a three run bomb. We could see that scenario repeat. Of course, “could” is a very fuzzy word.

The Angels are beating up on everyone. Why should that not include Astros starter Brad Peacock. I do think Peacock has potential to spontaneously improve, but I’m going to bet against him until I see evidence that it’s happening.

I’m not a big fan of Yusmeiro Petit or Jordan Lyles at Coors Field. They’ll probably both hold it together, but they might not.

Hitters (power): Jhonny Peralta has the platoon advantage against Jeff Locke. Earlier this year, I talked up Locke and his excellent walk rate. That has since regressed.

Your league has to be very thin for Kole Calhoun to still be floating around. If so, correct that mistake.

Dayan Viciedo and Avisail Garcia will have the platoon advantage against Tommy Milone.

Kennys Vargas is still available for a Hector Noesi start. I didn’t even bother to cite Noesi above since the game is against the Twins at Target Field.

Hitters (speed): If you need steals this late in the season, get used to David Peralta and Ender Inciarte.

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.

Baltimore, Chicago, and St. Louis all come with a 40 percent chance of rain.

The Link. The action skews red today and two of the top three stadiums are rain threats.

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