The Daily Grind: DFS, Streaming, and More for August 22

Agenda

1. Innings Roulette
2. The Daily Grind Invitational and Leaderboard
3. Daily DFS
4. SaberSim Observations
5. Tomorrow’s Targets
6. Factor Grid

1. Innings Roulette

We’re entering that time of year when young pitchers have their workloads heavily managed. If you’ve been leaning on Jose Fernandez, Aaron Sanchez, and Michael Fulmer this year (among others), the future might be shaky – especially in H2H formats. These pitchers are too good to cut, even if they’re skipped for an entire week That recently happened with Fernandez, and now Sanchez is cooling off in the minors until August 31.

At least news of Sanchez’s demotion came over the week. Those in weekly leagues will have enough time to switch him out of the lineup before games start later today. As for the players’ actual production, everybody responds to extra rest differently. Some guys pitch better when they’re fresh while with others, it takes very little to throw off their feel for command.

2. The Daily Grind Invitational and Leaderboard

We’re going to mix things up and go with DraftKings contests for the next few days. All the usual settings – $2, 20 users, top five paid. See ya there.

Oh, and as promised on Saturday, the leaderboard is updated.

3. Daily DFS 

Early: Just one game early today – at Great American Ballpark. Cincy is one of my favorite stacking grounds so I’m sad to see them excluded from the day’s action. The game features Scott Kazmir and Homer Bailey.

Late: The other eight games are in the late slate. DraftKings has finally corrected their multi-week mispricing of Carlos Carrasco. He’s probably the top play tonight visiting the Athletics.  Jon Lester in San Diego and Stephen Strasburg at Baltimore are also of interest. Those Orioles matchups in particular are fun for GPPs. They have their share of big nights – even against good pitchers – but they also put together some 14 strikeout games.

Dylan Bundy is on the opposite side of Strasburg tonight. If you’re already gambling on the O’s to bop a few home runs against the ace, then you might as well double down on a solid Bundy outing. The righty is coming off his worst start, but he ranged from good to great in his previous five starts.

Blake Snell has a similarly volatile floor and ceiling to Bundy. Snell is opposite a very difficult Red Sox offense (and David Price). The southpaw is unlikely to get much run support, and he rarely throws more than five-plus innings. He’ll usually make up for the short outings with strikeouts.

Stack Targets: Andrew Triggs, Cody Martin, Edwin Jackson, Jimmy Nelson, Chad Bettis

4. SaberSim Observations

Lester, Price, Strasburgh, Michael Pineda, and Carrasco round out the top five today. Count me as less than confident with homer happy Pineda versus the homer happier Mariners. The upside is there for a strong outing with a big strikeout total.

Stacks include the Cubs, Nationals, Diamondbacks, Braves, Rockies, Reds, Dodgers, and Brewers.

5. Tomorrow’s Targets 

Pitchers to Start: Last week, Joe Musgrove cratered against the all-or-nothing Orioles offense. Even in a terrible outing in which he allowed three home runs, he demonstrated his typical command of the strike zone. This time around, he’ll be pitching at PNC Park with National League rules. I expect him to cruise through six easy innings.

Also consider: Jon Gray, Chase Anderson, Archie Bradley, Sean Manaea

Pitchers to Exploit: I haven’t suddenly soured on Tyler Skaggs, but I sure don’t want to use the lefty against the Blue Jays. Especially not in Toronto. Skaggs has made three straight poor starts versus good offenses. This is his toughest assignment yet.

Also consider: Ivan Nova, Derek Holland, Dan Straily, Andrew Cashner, Clay Buchholz, Jake Thompson, Anthony Ranaudo, Anibal Sanchez, Kyle Gibson, Jon Niese, Rob Whalen, CC Sabathia, Christian Friedrich

Hitters (power): About a week ago, I noticed MGL (from The Book fame) go on a twitter rant about right-handed hitter handedness splits. To make a short story shorter, he explained that righties don’t have handedness splits – if you think you see someone who does, it’s almost certainly a small sample blip. And remember, there are a lot of crappy lefties in the league which can skew the numbers.

There’s always to any rule. Brandon Guyer is probably one of those. He has over a 1.000 OPS against southpaws this season and great career numbers too (143 wRC vs. LHP and 84 wRC vs. RHP). However, the deeper dig into the data, the easier it is to see MGL’s point. Guyer doesn’t have better plate discipline versus lefties over his 498 plate appearance career against them. He has an extra 80 points of ISO and a higher BABIP, but his batted ball profile doesn’t really support the divergence.

Take from it what you will. This year, his numbers against southpaws are absurd, and he’ll face Manaea tomorrow.

Also consider: Jorge Soler, Franklin Gutierrez, Mike Zunino, Dae-ho Lee, Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge, Jedd Gyorko, Gerardo Parra, Ryan Howard, Melky Cabrera, Pedro Alvarez, Hyun-soo Kim

Hitters (speed): Cesar Hernandez is swinging a pretty hot stick all of a sudden as the Phillies leadoff man. He even has a pair of home runs in his last five games. Hernandez is opposed by the ludicrously terrible stage magician, The Great Ranaudo.

Also consider: Rajai Davis, Jorge Polanco, Orlando Arcia, Tim Anderson

6. The Factor Grid

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.

The Link.

This post is not brought to you by any DFS platform. The current author is quite pleased to present a DFS ad free environment.