Are you just sick and tired of seeing your fantasy baseball team at the bottom of the standings? Can’t seem to make up ground even though you watch the games every night, and are very active on your league’s waiver wire (and even downloaded RotoBaller's FREE iPhone waiver wire app)? Have no fear, we have the perfect solution for you fellow RotoBallers and fantasy baseball freaks.
Enter daily league fantasy baseball, where you can use your accrued knowledge of fantasy baseball to compete each and every night from scratch with a new roster. Just draft your roster (slightly different style on all three of our favorite sites) using a salary cap based system, and sit back and enjoy the games for that night! With these types of leagues, you can leave the hopelessness of your seasonal fantasy formats aside, and focus on the next 3 plus months of fantasy baseball action.
Now the fun part - every Friday morning for the rest of the fantasy baseball season, we will be publishing this short teaser piece detailing one or two daily league player recommendations and sleepers, from three of our favorite DFS sites. This week’s featured expert analysis will include lineup value picks from Fanduel, DraftKings and DraftStreet.
Editors Note: If you want an even greater edge over your Fanduel and DraftKings competitors, check out RotoBaller’s highly effective Expert Daily Fantasy Baseball Picks Newsletter. In this simple to use cheat sheet format, we provide you a minimum of 15 daily league player recommendations (usually closer to 20 players), 3 days a week (Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday) throughout the fantasy baseball season.
Alright fellow RotoBallers, without further ado, let’s get right to the meat and potatoes for Friday, June 27th 2014:
FanDuel Lineup Recommendations for 6/27
Tyson Ross (SP) $6,700 - Facing the big bad Arizona Diamondbacks at home, this undervalued DFS stud is poised to make some Fanduel players some tournament money. This former A's great is bringing his home field 2.36 ERA and 1.05 WHIP to work tonight, and he has only given up 3 long balls in 53.1 IP (that grades out to only 12 HR allowed over a 200 IP workload for those of us good at quick math), while striking out 56 helpless batters in that span. Those are ace pitcher numbers in case you weren't sure, so save a few shekels and put the 13th most expensive starting pitcher into your Fanduel lineup tonight. You won't be able to afford him on DraftKings either, so this is your one chance for DFS glory.
DraftKings Lineup Recommendations for 6/27
Brad Miller (SS) $3,000 - Simply put, it ain't easy to find value every night across the boards on all of the DFS sites, but hey, that's what we're here for right? Upon scouring the lineup options for tonight on DrafKings (like some of us scour for barstool beauties with desperation circa 3AM at your local watering hole), we have come across a RotoBaller favorite in Brad "Used To Be Bad" Miller. The thing is this, if you look at his 2014 in-season batting average, you might choke on this recommendation and call us bat shit crazy, but when you dig a bit deeper (as we do 24/7/365), you will find a deep sleeper, at the hard to fill shortstop position (at least until they correct this undervalued price tag in a day or two). Ladies and gentleman, this young man has serious pop (to go along with his top pedigree), and has been hitting at about a .285 clip for the past 30 days, and even driving in a run or two. Now that's what we call sleeper value for $3,000, going up against a young and erratic, home run prone, starting pitcher (Trevor Bauer). Get this dude into your lineup and thank us later, because you cant even buy a dirty dog at your local street meat stand for this low of a price.
DraftStreet Lineup Recommendations for 6/27
Brandon Workman (SP) $9779 - First of all, you have to love the pricing job they do at DraftStreet! Props to whoever is doing this stuff, because sometimes I feel like we should be adding cents to those awkward dollar values we have in play. Mini-rant aside, let us present to you tonight's undervalued pitcher for the Mount Everest of DFS site (as so well put by Dr. Roto of Sirius XM Fantasy Sports), Brandon "Putting In" Workman. Yes fellow shocked RotoBallers, we just recommended a relatively unknown Red Sox starter as someone to roll a few dollars of confidence out on. Let's shed some light on one of your three potential pitchers on DraftStreet for tonight. As the Red Sox 2nd round pick in the 2010 draft, 6-5 righty outta good old Arlington, Texas comes into this start with a 2.88 ERA and 1.02 WHIP in 34.1 innings pitched this year. He gets the very tough task (sarcastic tone) of facing off against the Yankees beleaguered Vidal "The Homerun Machine" Nuno. Now usually we don't dwell on the opposition's lowliness when deciding on potential starters for any given night, but similarly to passover, tonight is not like any other night because tonight we will dwell on how bad Nuno is (instead of how potentially studly Workman is). Nuno and his hellacious ERA are coming to work at a stadium that inflates the homerun rate at close to twice the league average. Couple that with his league leading 15 homeruns surrendered, 7.09 home ERA and he makes the perfect DFS streamer opponent for literally almost any pitcher. We would borderline start an Edwin Jackson or R.A. Dickey in this scenario (not literally, just drilling home the point), so you know we're running out the more stable Brandon "Putting In" Workman with impunity, and saving enough mozzarella to slide in Johnny "The Untouchable" Cueto as our complimenting ace starter.
The DFS Strategic Wrapup
On most nights, and on all sites, the key to any successful DFS gaming strategy is to try to “buy low”, or unearth some undervalued talent, using split stats, or favorable player platoons. Sometimes sites just miss something and you can find a glitchy play (like when Hunter Pence was dropped to $2,200 flukily on Fanduel this past week). Although predicting the outcomes of baseball games can be extremely tough (if not borderline impossible), using a smart analytical process, and good sabermetric data to back up our intuition, gives us the edge we need to slowly make incremental gains over our competitors.
We can’t stress this point to you enough so we’ll say it yet again! If you haven’t experienced the thrill of drafting a new fantasy team every night, and competing for just one day, then you have no idea what fun you are missing! We highly suggest you join in on the fun, especially if you are one of the unfortunate souls who has had a tough go at it in seasonal fantasy baseball formats. Whether the injury bug bit your team, or whether your draft did not live up to your expectations (and hype), you now have a fantastic option (and reason) to keep playing fantasy baseball for the rest of the year. Good luck today playing your DFS games tonight RotoBallers!