Dongers Club – Page 27 – FullTime Fantasy

The Dongers Club – Sat Mar 30 (Early)

Preview the six early games on DraftKings and four on FanDuel with Steve Renner in the Dongers Club.

The Dongers Club – Fri, March 29th

Opening Day is finally here. The Dongers Club kicks off the 2019 in style with the plays for both DK and FD Main slates.

The Dongers Club – Opening Day

Opening Day is finally here. The Dongers Club kicks off the 2019 in style with the plays for both DK and FD Main slates.

2019 Dongers Club Theory of the Year

The Dongers Club is the MLB DFS source provided by SDCHICKENS (Steve Renner)

2019 Dongers Club Manifesto

Dongers Club Preview: The Pitcher Process

The final preview article for the 2019 season is here, and it breaks down thoughts on selecting a pitcher.

Dongers Club 2019 Preview: Stacking ***** (Picking Hitters)

I have been labeled a grumpy old troll at times and one of the common reasons is when I come out with my famous “Stacking Sucks” statement in reference to anyone saying that stacking is the only way to win in Baseball DFS. To be fair, I’m usually trolling when I go on these rants, but there are some serious pet peeves I have when it comes to folks discussing simply using “stacks” as their logic for picking players. To have things in full context, we must first look at the definitions of what a stack is and how it relates to what I am saying. STACK In my mind, a stack is considered when you play 4 hitters (or up to 5 on DraftKings) from the same team. It doesn’t matter if they hit consecutively in the order or not, you are merely just taking the idea that if a team scores 7 runs on 15 hits and nobody else has that much offensive production on the slate then you’re going to want to have as much exposure to that team as possible. I completely agree with this mindset and I have no issue with it as an approach. MINI STACK A mini stack would be when you have three hitters from a team but choose to not take it to the max limits on the DFS sites. There’s no difference between this and a FULL stack other than one less bat. That’s it. Those are the only types of stacks and I do them both often. What I won’t tolerate is someone trying to take this down as far as they can because they only know the word stack and say that 2 players from one team is a stack. In order to have a ‘stack’ we need a number of things. Two is not a number of things. It’s two players, it could be a combo, it could be just random clicking on accident and you didn’t even realize you had two from the same team. Two is not a stack and please stop listening to anyone who calls it a mini-stack. We must draw the line somewhere. Now the question is, how do you build your lineup and this is where the real #StackingSucks label comes in for me. 4×4 STACK – A very simple construction. You are playing 4 batters from team 1 and 4 batters from team 2 and putting them in the same lineup. 4×3 STACK – The most common approach is to have two different sized stacks with a one off at either a position of weakness on the slate or a must own player. 3×3 STACK – Two mini stacks put together with enough flexibility to fill in our one offs. That’s it… Some will try to force in their 2 man stack again with a 3-3-2. Sure, 3-3-2 is a VERY common approach because we’re limiting our team exposure down to just three teams. But that isn’t a stacking method any more than a 3x3x1x1 approach where we have two one off teams. The problem with stacking, is always who do you stack in the lineup? I do not like to blind stack teams, which would be taking two teams like OAKLAND and SEATTLE and saying I want 4 players from each but I don’t care who the 4 players are. This is an MME approach where you are picking the teams you would like to have and then usually trusting a tool or optimizer to help give you the 4 best optimal players based on position, price and match-up but not caring at the end of the day who the four players are. So many times I will hear after the fact “oh man, you were on [Cincinnati], should have stacked 1-3-7-8…. But I played 1-2-4-5”. And here in lies why Stacking Sucks. Because if you are playing the Cincinnati Reds in that scenario then you should be doing multiple blind lineups to pull the Reds in. But if you aren’t a stacker like me and you want to pick the best players then you would be going in and identifying the Reds that you want to have. If you happen to wind up with 3 or 4 of them and have a ‘stack’ by definition then great. But our approach into building the lineup is where we can have more success going forward. So here’s a simple lineup construction thought … Are you playing MME? (I won’t even take it to the extreme here, lets just say are you going over 10 lineups?) If the answer is Yes. Then stack away. Stack teams as much as your heart desires and I would recommend doing 4x3x1 or 4×4 only with this approach. If the answer is No however like me, then let’s not ‘stack’. Let’s identify three things in our hitter selection to narrow it down and find the bats that we are going to end up using on that site. Which pitchers/bullpens are we targeting. We have to find the weakness out there and/or the spots that we’re going to be picking on for offense based on the pitchers. What environments are beneficial for hitting on this given slate. Usually driven by the weather and the ballpark environment itself. How does each position rate on a given slate in terms of pricing, quality of player and ratings. We should understand if there are a ton of Second Baseman on a given slate who stand out as good plays to help us determine if we can take a risk on rostering a low in the order 2B on that night who happens to be in one of our ‘stacks’. Using these three criteria on players we will identify a narrowed pool of teams and thus hitters. Depending on how much one team stands out above another, we will find ourselves likely playing multiple bats from one team. If we’re going to be attacking a pitcher/bullpen in

Tag: Dongers Club