MLB DFS Archives - Page 2 of 51

Sim Dongers Club – April 2nd

Thank goodness today isn’t April 1st, because nobody would believe this. But yes, there is simulated Baseball contests on FanDuel now. Before you ask, my response to your comment / question is … Whatever. I don’t want to hear the mocking that someone like myself would naturally be doing right now to someone (like myself) doing a fricken DFS article on a simulated sport. I’m here, and quite frankly I must admit that I’ve run out of Taysom Hill highlight videos to watch. Times are tough. FanDuel is claiming to do the simulation with numberFire’s custom simulator. While I don’t fully trust that and wish it was off the Strat-o-Matic simulations going on, we’ll take it for what it is and adapt as we go. Everything is free (including this article) on the site so cmon folks, just have fun with it. For God’s sake, there’s a DFS contest for COOKING out there. Side Note: Everyone should hit up @TheRobGeriak on twitter to have him start posting his food that he is cooking every day during this stay at home shit. The guy is becoming the next Top Chef. Here’s the games on today’s slate: Blue Jays (Anderson) vs Yankees (Tanaka) Mets (Stroman) vs Nationals (Strasburg) Indians (Bieber) vs Tigers (Boyd) Reds (Bauer) vs Pirates (Musgrove) White Sox (Keuchel) vs Red Sox (Perez) Brewers (Houser) vs Phillies (Wheeler) Mariners (Sheffield) vs Royals (Duffy) Athletics (Luzardo) vs Twins (Maeda) Orioles (Means) vs Cardinals (Hudson) For what it’s worth, these are all “day games” per the FanDuel timing. I’m not sure if they will simulate in real time or not, but it appears there is no late swap either way, so no need to worry about late swap theories at all. Here’s what jumps out at me for these games if they were being played in real life Strasburg day game but its not that warm in DC, so don’t bark up that tree Ryan Braun in Philadelphia — UPDATE: HE ISNT STARTING?!?#@?! WHO THE HELL IS RUNNING THIS SIMULATION?!@?#!@?#?!@#?!@#?! Questions I have on the sim Pay attention to how the sim uses bullpens — or even if we get that information at all. I say this because typically early in the year starting pitchers wouldnt go deep into games — but I dont know if the simulation will take that into account. If they are using a simulator like OOTP then it would. Same for defense/fielding. Weather likely isn’t a factor in simulation, but if it does, they have that listed on the FanDuel lineup page as well and ………… 13 MPH WIND OUT TO RIGHT IN PITTSBURGH. LiPNC is in effect. Cold and Rainy in Boston. 18 MPH WIND IN Philadelphia. So Braun’s homer will only go 403 feet. Strong winds out to right in Yankee stadium. 69 in Kansas City. Nice. Pitching Recommendations LOL @ Myself saying ‘Recommendations’ for a simulator. What a douchebag I am. Shane Bieber: The Tigers lineup is a little better this year with the additions of Schoop and Cron to the lineup, but it’s very RH heavy. Top of the lineup has two switch hitters in Goodrum and Reyes but Miggy-Cron-Schoop are the real concerns and Bieber should handle them. Danny Duffy: The Mariners suck, plain and simple here folks. He’s the cheap play for me — I like Luzardo but worry the simulation pulls him early. It’s worth noting that of all the famous remarks over the years I have uttered in the Dongers Club that it will be “the simulation pulls him early” which makes it way into the Smithsonian one day. Target Teams Yankees They are healthy in the simulation and against Chase Anderson the HR upside is strong for them at home today. Wish Luke Voit wasn’t batting 7th though. White Sox So I am going against the idea that weather is going to come into play here today because if this was a real game I’d avoid it with the weather in Boston being blah. But Martin Perez is an easy target for us in a good hitters park when weather is taken out. Yoan Moncada is a must own from White Sox today. SNEAKY Royals Hi. It’s Justus Sheffield. He is not good at the Baseball and Hunter Dozier is going yardo today. Orioles Nobody will play the Orioles today vs Dakota Hudson and I think the Orioles and Pirates are two bad teams that folks will pick on with pitchers and they would both be good leverage spots. Austin Hays was a sleeper for me this year, so lets get it going in the simulation to tilt the lack of real baseball. DONGERS CLUB Hunter Dozier – OF – Royals – Chairman Luke Voit – 1B – Yankees Yoan Moncada – 3B – White Sox Mike Moustakas – 2B – Reds — LiPNC Gleyber Torres – SS – Yankees Austin Hays – OF – Orioles Gregory Polanco – OF – Pirates Salvador Perez – C – Royals BONUS …………………………….. Eloy Jimenez – OF – White Sox Enjoy!! Or just keep drinking and maybe one day all of this will be over

The Dongers Club – ’20 Preview: Top 10 Busts

We now move into the real 2020 Preview Articles and first up I’m going to go through 10 things that I am very cautious of in the 2020 MLB season. You can use this for seasonal drafts but also as

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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