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“Small Slate Gems” MLB DFS Pitch Profiles and Stack Strategy Match-ups 10/23

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.  Walker Buehler takes the mound for the Dodgers as a -150 favorite.  For the Rays, we get Charlie Morton and the total is sitting at just 7.5 runs.

 

The Rays bats struck out more than anybody in baseball this season. What we don’t see above is that Buehler had an ERA of 4.15 against RHBs but 2.79 against LHBs. I would expect the Rays to end up very LH heavy just because that’s what they tend to do.  If they don’t go LH heavy and switch it up, I really like Renfroe for GPPs.  As it sits right now, my top two plays will be Arozarena and Lowe.  Arozarena has destroyed fastballs all postseason and I think Lowe keeps it going.  I think guys like Adames, Zunino, and Meadows have routes to pay off in our GPP builds.

The key for Buehler will be his fastball.  If he is able to keep it just above the knees or at the letters, he should get plenty of swings and misses. That’s the pitch (aside from his sinker) that gets the fewest swing and misses (in terms of %).  He just throws so hard that he should be able to get away with some mistakes against a few of the Rays bats.

 

We know that the Dodgers absolutely destroy fastballs (we knew that before we looked above).  They do really well against sinkers from RHPs as well.  Taking a look at the profiles, we see that Bellinger has the best overall match of every bat in this game.  The guys that have very solid matches are Pederson, Seager, and Betts.  Stop if you’ve heard me list those names before!  Guys like Chris Taylor and Max Muncy have decent profiles while guys like Rios and Smith have smaller samples against some important pitches.

Morton HAS to figure out how to avoid getting into fastball counts, especially against the Dodgers LHBs.  They crush his kind of fastball and he has had trouble with it against LHBs.  They have an XwOBA of .435 against it with an ISO of .219.  When it comes to attacking the RHBs, he needs to rely on his sinker-curve as he has been EXTREMELY stingy with those pitches against them.


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!