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“Small Slate Gems” MLB DFS Pitch Profiles and Stack Strategy Match-ups 10/21

Welcome to the inaugural postseason of this article series.  In this article series, I am going to break down each playoff game on the slate based purely on pitch profile match-ups.  The goal of this series is to locate the gems for our smaller slate/single-game slate contests that can provide an edge and lead us to some GPP takedowns!  My name is Eric aka @Razzle11Grinds on Twitter, make sure to give me a follow as I’ll occasionally make updates to the advice in the article out on Twitter as well as inside our coaching forums. With that said, let’s get it started!

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Before I get started.  Let’s take a look at the colors that you will see below.  When you see numbers highlighted in red, they are numbers that benefit the pitcher.  Numbers highlighted in blue are ones that benefit the hitter, while the ones that are left white are in a middling range that might give a very slight edge to the hitters.

 


Tampa Bay Rays @ Los Angeles Dodgers

Welcome to the LAST series of the MLB season, THE World Series!  We get the teams who were the best in their respective leagues this season, facing off for the championship.  Tony Gonsolin takes the mound for the Dodgers as a -135 favorite.  For the Rays, we get Blake Snell and the total is sitting at just 8 runs.

 

The Rays bats struck out more than anybody in baseball this season.  We could see Gonsolin benefit from that or we could see Gonsolin provide us just 60-ish pitches.  Looking above, we see a pretty decent mix of blue and red match-ups.  The one that stands out the most is Austin Meadows.  My issue with Meadows is that he looks lost at the plate right now, in general.  We see that Arozarena doesn’t have much of sample size and the Dodgers are going to do their best to not let him beat them.  Guys like Kiermaier and Lowe have decent profiles, while Choi is an interesting GPP dart option.

The key for Gonsolin is going to be his splitter.  When we look at the Rays bats, nearly all of them struggle with that pitch.  If he is able to pair that with his slider, he could find himself having some strong success here.  He has to figure out a way to limit the damage when using his fastball.  He has allowed ISOs of .211 to LHBs and .257 to RHBs with his fastball.  Let’s take a look at a couple of the piggyback options to go with Gonsolin, May and Urias, below.

We see that the reds and blues are a little more spread out for May.  The best match-up would be Brandon Lowe but we know that Lowe has been struggling at the plate this postseason.  I don’t expect Renfroe to be in the lineup so his profile, while it looks nice, won’t be something we are using.  Guys like Meadows and Kiermaier do not match-up as well with May as they did with Gonsolin.  I am intrigued by the Adames match-up even though he has struggled as well.  The one guy that I think could pay off handsomely is Mike Zunino.  I really hope that the Dodgers don’t do it, for their sake, but let’s look at Urias next.

The HUGE key for May will be limiting the damage by LHBs against his sinker-curve combination.  He has allowed an ISO of .250 by LHBs against his sinker.  His curve has allowed a wOBA of .423 to those LHBs.

Let me say this again, I think the Dodgers are making a mistake if they go to Urias in this game.  They need to use him as a traditional starter in Game 4, in my opinion.  If Urias does come in, we definitely see Renfroe get at least 1 AB in the game.  He matches up well but can we gamble on just 1 AB in a situation where Urias might not even pitch?  Austin Meadows surprises me a bit with a solid match-up in a LvL situation.  Again, with Arozarena we don’t have much of a sample and the same can be said for guys like Lowe and Brosseau.

Urias needs to figure out how to utilize his curve-slider against RHBs.  If he can figure that out, he takes another step forward into stardom.  He has allowed RHBs an ISO of .364 against his curve while allowing an ISO of .238 against his slider.  His change-up is one of the best in the game at this point.

 

We know that Snell has shown command issues and he’s had trouble going 6 this season.  As with yesterday, we see that the Dodgers destroy fastballs and this time it’s against an LHP.  I am mostly going to continue to be all about Mookie Betts, thanks to the profile and his BvP history against Snell.  Bellinger stands out as a sneaky (Bellinger isn’t very sneaky, generally) LvL candidate here.  He profiles really well against the fastball-slider combination.  Justin Turner and Max Muncy are two guys that have really solid match-ups across the board.  I think the field blindly will use Kike Hernandez but I think that could be a mistake and I might look to use Chris Taylor instead.

Blake Snell is a Cy-Young winner who has really been brought along slowly this season.  He still flashes his big-time K upside but he isn’t being very efficient.  When I look at his numbers, I notice a route for LHBs to have success.  Knowing how strong this team is from the left side, we can figure out what Snell needs to be sharp with.  He needs to be on point with his slider-curve combination to LHBs.  He has allowed an ISO of .429 to LHBs with his slider over the last 5 seasons.  Those LHBs have an ISO of .235 with an average distance of 358 (yeah, 358) feet against his curveball.  His curve will be key against the RHBs as well.  They have an XwOBA of .399 and an average distance of 316.5 feet against it.


There you have it ladies and gentlemen, the debut of the Pitch Profile Breakdown article!  If you have any questions make sure you tag me in the chat. We can discuss thoughts on individual match-ups!  As you can see, there are paths to success for each team playing today!