Welcome in to Ben’s MLB DFS Building Blocks for DraftKings and FanDuel! In this article, I will highlight my favorite MLB DFS plays for small-field tournament formats. If you’re interested in signing up for premium access, which grants you Core Plays for every slate, projections + expert picks and our premium Discord click HERE. You can also sign up for our AI-driven sports betting tools and access to my daily betting card by clicking HERE. Let’s get into the plays…
Pitcher
Welcome into another season of Ben’s MLB Building Blocks! I believe this is my seventh season providing MLB DFS content and I couldn’t be more excited to have baseball back. The first few articles are going to be abbreviated in the pitching section while we wait for some data to build up – and we will mostly be relying on 2023 data for the first month — barring any clear changes to pitch-mix. Let’s dive into our Opening Day starters…
- Tarik Skubal
- Tyler Glasnow
- Pablo Lopez
- Jesus Luzardo
- Cole Ragans
This is my list in order of pitchers today.
If you’ve read my content at all, you know I’ve been leading the charge for Tarik Skubal since he made his major league debut. It’s been a long journey with him in terms of his health, but he looks primed for a major leap in 2024. He’s coming off career-best numbers in 2023 in terms of strikeout stuff and he experienced a small spike in velocity this spring as well. The first few slates of the season always see this guys on shorter leashes, I’ll side with the dominant strikeout pitcher against the worst lineup as my favorite overall option.
Glasnow should actually have the longest leash of these guys given that he’s on extended rest after making his first start of the season last week in Korea. He labored through his outing, but I’m not concerned. That happens sometimes in your first real outing and I think we can comfortably roster him in all formats today.
Lopez is projecting worse than some of the guys below him on this list, and that will lower his ownership. I’m a big Lopez fan, he’s coming off a monster year for Minnesota and is one of the most underrated pitchers in the league. I’m not sold on the Kansas City hype this season. Bobby Witt is an absolute star but the lineup is pretty bad other than him. This is one of the best pitching parks on Opening Day and I think we definitely could see a pitcher’s duel with Ragans opposing him.
Luzardo is going to be chalky due to his price-tag — and I think he is viable in all formats. Pittsburgh’s offense could surprise this season when fully healthy but it’s clear that Luzardo is going to grade out as the top point per dollar option. For cash games you’re definitely playing him — and I would be fine fading in larger-field stuff.
Ragans is an absolute wagon and will continue to be so this season. I love him for his season long outlook and would be more inclined to lock him in if it was a watered down pitching slate. He’s a strong GPP play and could even be paired with Lopez on DK in hopes for a low scoring game.
Building Blocks
Jazz Chisholm
Mitch Keller is not someone that I’m going to go out of my way to attack this season. That being said, if I’m going to pick off bats against him, it’s going to be in his first start after he struggled to get going in spring training. By his last ST start, we were starting to see progress from Keller but he struggled to hit his fastball velocity that we saw from him last season. He was able to generate whiffs with his sweeper in his last outing, but we could see decreased velo from him again today while he works his arm up to strength. If he does struggle a bit with velo today, that will have an impact considering he relies on his fastball around 50% of the time. We know that Jazz has big-time pop vs right-handed pitching, but he feasts on fastball as well. If Keller continues his decreased velo in his first real start of 2024, this is something Chisholm could take advantage of and he’s one of my favorite overall bats on Thursday.
Will Benson + Johnny India
Cincinnati will be arguably the chalkiest stack on Opening Day as they face-off with Josiah Gray and the Washington Nationals. I think Washington could surprise people this season and not be quite as bad as expected — but that doesn’t change the fact that the Reds have one of the largest team totals on the slate sitting north of 5 runs. We’ve seen Gray have homerun issues in the past, and that could be an issue against a Reds lineup that carried a .220 ISO as a team vs RHP in 2023. Will Benson and Johnny India stick out to me based on price — both are below $4,000 on DraftKings and will bat first and second setting the table for the likes of Jeimer Candelario (.229 ISO) and Elly De La Cruz. Overall, it will be chalky but in small-field or single-entry formats I think this cheap Reds duo are great centerpieces for your lineups.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
