Welcome back to the DailyOverlay Value Index for Monday, April 17! Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend, stuffed yourself silly, found you and egg or two and lined your pockets with cash over the weekend with DFS baseball.
Tonight we have a solid 9-game slate to talk about. While the pitching options aren’t as strong as they were Friday (and boy was I wrong about Porcello, and I didn’t have enough Kershaw), there are a lot of great places to attack pitchers with bats.
Danny Salazar, Robbie Ray and John Lackey are the three highest priced pitchers on today’s slate. After that, the bottom kind of drops off. I haven’t made up my mind on a value SP2 yet (and yes I will pair all three of the top pitching options together), Brandon McCarthy and Jaime Garcia seem to be the first couple of guys that pop off my radar. I hope we all figure it out and take down this slate!
Remember, today, Tuesday and Wednesday are premium days for the Index. You can bypass those three days and get access to all other premium content this week by signing up for a 7-day FREE trial run. I will offer a couple of free selections each day, but you will have to make the decision from there if you choose to see the rest.
Good luck to you! I love this slate!
Freddie Freeman – 1B – Atlanta Braves – $4,600
Analysis: Freddie didn’t pay off for me Sunday against Trevor Plodding Cahill, so does as you should in daily fantasy basketball and send that damn bucket down the well again. It is said that Atlanta’s new stadium is going to play more to hitter’s favor, but that remains to be seen as we are just two weeks into the season. Freddie Freeman instantly pops off the page to me in a great spot against the aging, flyball pitcher in Jered Weaver. Surprisingly, Weaver handled the Rockies in Coors very well. But now he gets the Braves and I’ll be interested to see if people go to Weaver as an SP2 tonight. God I hope they do! Freeman has been a model of consistency against RH pitching in his career. Since 2013, Freeman sports a ridiculous .401 wOBA, a 41% hard contact rate and a .233 ISO. Freeman is coming in with hits in 8 of his last 9 games. Weaver owns a .336 wOBA against lefties since 2014 and allows a 1.46 HR/9 rate. His hard contact allowed to lefties is a shade under 30%, but he’s a fly ball pitcher who will serve up BP to power hitters like Freeman.
Martin Prado – 2B – Miami Marlins – $3,300
Analysis: Jose Altuve, Brian Dozier (Team BvP), Logan Forsythe….those are all second basemen that are in excellent spots tonight. BUT there’s one guy who almost outweighs them all – Martin Prado! Expected to return to the lineup Monday, Prado and the Marlins (my favorite stack of the night) are taking on the Mariners and the Little Mermaid at Safeco. A nice little stat I learned about Safeco Field this weekend was how the left-field fences were moved in last year. What once was a favorable pitcher’s park, was a top-5 in homeruns in 2016. Hmm…I like those odds tonight. Another interesting stat. Prado is Top-10 in the majors against southpaws with a .401 wOBA since 2014. That’s better than Jose Altuve and Brian Dozier, just to name a few. He’s not better against lefties than someone else on this list, and if you sign up for our free trial or subscribe, you will find out who that is (insert wink emoji). Oh, I forgot to mention that Miranda owns a 2.21 HR/9 rate against RH bats and is allowing 35.6% hard contact rate (and he’s an extreme flyball pitcher).
