FullTime Fantasy

Facebook-f X-twitter Instagram Youtube

Category: DFS – MLB

The Dongers Club – ’20 Preview: First Pitch

We begin the 2020 Dongers Club Season by taking time to announce the lessons learned, strategy changes and overall plans that I have for the upcoming MLB DFS season based upon a long few months in the off-season to digest 2019 and other prior seasons. To me, no other major sport has gone through more changes the last few years than Baseball and one can anticipate the sport to continue to evolve under the unfortunate direction of Rob Manfred.  We’ve seen the well documented shift towards launch angles & exit velocity with an increased emphasis in upside for at bats at the risk of the formerly perceived negative downside of striking out.  We’ve seen some teams adopt a unique approach to handling starting pitching with the use of openers or just generally mediocre arms who are only going to go 4 maybe 5 innings at best before turning over to a setup bullpen from the middle on out.  And probably most disturbing last season we saw more teams completely going as bad as they can in an effort to gut payroll, rebuild for the future and just not even bother trying to compete while other teams become more ‘super’ teams. It should be well known if you pay attention to anything I say that I’ve never been a fan of Rob Manfred, but to me there’s a clear and obvious direction that MLB should head in terms of it’s competitive balance/scheduling/league structure and it has nothing to do with salary caps or finances. The league is proposing going to a 6 team playoff format in both leagues while also allowing a team to select their opponent.  It’s mostly stupid but actually the idea of changing the playoff format isn’t all that bad.  You see, one thing that has changed over the years in Baseball is teams now actually understand that sometimes they have no shot at the beginning of the season as the gap between the haves with free-agency money and the have-nots grows.  So if they are in a division with too many hurdles to compete in the short term then just go out and be bad all together from the get go.  This season we can already rule out the Orioles, Royals, Tigers, Mariners, Marlins, Pirates and Giants from contention.  It’s nowhere near as bad as last year where those same teams plus the Blue Jays, White Sox, Rangers, Reds among others went into the season with zero chance at competing. My proposal is as follows. Expand from 30 Major League teams to 32 teams. Re-Align to Eight divisions of Four (Similar to the NFL) Expand the playoffs to Six teams in each league (Similar to the current NFL) The expansion aspect is the easy part.  Las Vegas and Montreal make perfect spots with Nashville as a distant third city to add a MLB team.  Las Vegas is a hot bed for Baseball talent and is proving to be a fine pro sports town.  Montreal is just ripping the bandaid off and going back to a city that lost a team prior assuming they offer up a stadium.  Nashville would be the leverage in case Montreal cannot get it done. So we then go to four team divisions AL East:   Boston, New York, Baltimore, Toronto AL North:   Minnesota, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit AL South:   Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Texas, Houston AL West:   Seattle, Anaheim, Oakland, Las Vegas NL East:  Philadelphia, Montreal, New York, Washington NL North:  Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Chicago NL South:  St. Louis, Atlanta, Florida, Colorado NL West:  Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Arizona The American League re-alignment is the easy part but the National League has an obvious issue between the North and South where you lose the Cardinals/Cubs rivalry and also pairing Colorado in the same division as Miami is … well, weird.   So this is a spot where expanding to Nashville would make a little more geographical sense as they’d slide into the south with Washington and St. Louis/Colorado would both go into the North (or just call it the midwest) while Pittsburgh slides into the East with Cincinnati, Philadelphia and the NY Mets.   Either way you get the general idea. Then the four division winners plus two wild card teams make the playoffs.  By doing this you create an easier path for every team to make the playoffs because each team only has to be better than three teams to earn that automatic berth. I would make the first round a three game series where ALL three games are at the home team’s stadium.  Keep in mind this is two division winners vs the two wild card teams.  Unfair?  Deal with it.  You want to get an easy path then go win your damn division. Second round would be a five game series 2-2-1 and the Championship rounds would remain best of seven format. There’s a few other details in regards to balanced schedule and interleague play but I’ll spare you those details and just tell you that the schedule would be reduced to 156 games.  The argument against this has always been from purists who said it would ruin the statistical integrity of the game. Exactly.  That’s already been done. So there Mr. Commissioner.  There’s your resolution to your beyond stupid proposal….   THE 2020 DONGERS CLUB Now onto my thoughts for the upcoming DFS season and what changes you will definitely see form the Dongers Club.  Until of course I decide to change my mind by April 23rd or some random date like that. I played too much last year and the year before and the year before.  By too much I mean too many slates and ultimately I was letting the pride that I had in writing analysis for as many slates as possible interfere with sanity of when I should and should not be doing an article. A lot of this stemmed from me watching or hearing about other “analysts” in the industry who right around mid-March would

The Dongers Club … Hello Spring Training

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT6E9zqIEyk How you doin? How you doin? My Man…. Well, well, well.  The 2020 Baseball season is here!  Sort of.   Yes, we have Spring Training in the lobby on DraftKings and have since Saturday for those of you who were out enjoying your weekends and actually living a good life.  But now you are back at it on Monday with afternoon baseball on every single day and you are wondering to yourself — What exactly is the purpose of life if you do not spend crowns on MLB Spring Training Contests over there at … DraftKings dot com — and I am here to not only encourage you to do that, but I actually think it’s okay to spend real American Dollars on Spring Training Baseball my friends. Yep.  I’m doing a slight 180 from last year when I was mocking anyone who did a Spring Training article, although I should go ahead and drop the sad (but maybe good?) news for you right now.  I am NOT doing an analysis/picks article every single day for Spring Training.  In fact, I don’t think I am going to do any articles of the such….  Well, certainly not for another week or so until we start to see things.  But this is merely a simple tips sheet on how you should approach Spring Training if you actually want to make some money and not be pissed off before the real games begin. Starting sometime later this week I’ll be rolling out my 2020 Season Preview articles much like I did last year that will conclude with the annual Dongers Club Manifesto podcast, so be on the look out for that in the coming weeks. But for now, let’s talk about these Spring Training Slates   THINGS TO KNOW SLATE FORMATS So far it looks like DraftKings is keeping with the system of having slates that include just four games on them and so far we have seen mostly Grapefruit League games but I am sure we will start to get some Cactus League action in there as well.  If you are a Baseball noob, Grapefruit is the Florida based teams and Cactus is Arizona based teams.  I mean, it’s pretty fricken obvious given that the two Spring Training locations are Arizona and Florida and I don’t seem to recall any cactus tree’s in Florida but in case you needed that little 411, now you are smarter and have officially learned something today and can go home from work.  Congrats…. The actual teams who are on the slates usually depends upon if the teams are playing Split Squads or not, as DK will avoid such situations thankfully.  But for the most part we’re getting some repeat teams on the schedules and that’s kinda nice.  STARTING LINEUPS These are best/first found on Twitter and I have a list called Dongers Club DFS that you can pull up (@steve_renner) and use which I haven’t fully refreshed for 2020 but it has beat reporters from every team and most are good about posting the teams lineup 3-4 hours ahead of the start time.  That said, DraftKings has been very good about listing the probable starting pitcher and the actual lineups within their app/site.  So really in most cases you don’t even need to be scouring twitter to find out the starting lineup if going in an hour before lock or so and most games are starting at the lock time so no late swap really to deal with.  If you do some digging you can find who the expected relief pitchers are going to be and also any tidbits on how long hitters are going to stay in games from beat reporters.  Some are better than others. WEATHER It’s is a bigger deal than you may think.  Rain can be your biggest issue some days in Spring Training and thus if you care about your money you do need to check-in and monitor this.  Given that we have lots of Florida information, don’t expect easy weather reports.  Games will get called fairly regularly in Spring Training at the first sight of rain. BALLPARKS I did some research on some ballparks in Spring Training last year and found that yes there are some which are more hitter friendly than others.  No, I don’t seem to have this list around right now but it is something I will check into and try to pull back up for you.  I wouldn’t read too much into it though.   GENERAL DFS THOUGHTS CONTEST SELECTION Just like regular season MLB DFS, your success will be in the contests that have fewer people in them.  But not necessarily for the same reasons. I don’t care about some jabroni who is going to come into the game in the 5th inning and get two or three at bat’s and put up 27 DraftKings points.  That’s a 100% guessing game and that’s something to be reserved for some loser kid to waste their life mass entering and playing a bunch of shit using what they think is math and then feel they’re sharper than the rest of us and will combine two words into a DFS tout site and proclaim they are the greatest of all the lands because they had a lineup that had a 3 man stack of Marlins hitters that won’t even make the Opening Day roster.  F that. phew…. the run on sentences that ramble about DFS are in mid-season form! I don’t plan on spending more than 10 minutes putting together a Spring Training Lineup.  Considering the lack of $ out there for it and the limited playing time for the players there’s no reason to spend more than 10 minutes on it (besides this stupid article I’m doing now).   So all I care about are the guys who are STARTING.   Plus, as we get deeper into Spring Training the starting pitchers are going to go deeper, so finding who the second or third reliever may not be