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. Let’s dive into our Wednesday starters…
- Freddy Peralta
- Luis Severino
- Tarik Skubal
- Bryce Miller
- Paul Blackburn
This is my list in order of pitchers today.
Once again today, I will be fading Kevin Gausman at what should be moderate ownership. His xERA is one of the worst in baseball and he’s still throwing his fastball around 2mph slower than in years past. He’s struggled vs the Yankees when healthy, and he’s going to have to prove it to me before I’m willing to roster him. The same can be said for Steven Matz who is projecting for chalk against the Oakland A’s. I get that the match-up and price are good, but he’s shown no semblance of strikeout ability this season and that’s what I’m chasing for DFS purposes.
Peralta is the clear number one for me, he’s become so consistent over the last year or so and is my number one for cash games and GPPs.
Skubal has been great to start the season, but his match-up is a little tougher than Peralta which puts him in the GPP-only tier for me as I’m not looking to play them together.
Severino is my favorite SP2 today. He’s outperformed his metrics but a small amount this season, but most importantly he looks healthy and is back to striking out batters. He’s cheap, and has much more K upside than Matz making him my preferred value play.
Building Blocks
Juan Soto
As I noted above, I’m very concerned about Gausman right now and we can take advantage of ownership on bats against him due to his name-brand value. Soto has been everything the Yankees could have imagined to begin the season. He’s top-5 overall in average exit velocity and 12th overall in xwOBA. He’s been patient when he needs to be, and has helped revitalize the team that had the wind knocked out of their sails when Gerrit Cole went down with an injury. Soto has the highest wOBA on the team vs RHP since the start of last season and has had prior success against Gausman. His ownership should be moderate to low, and I think the spot is much better than the casual fan thinks.
Vinnie Pasquantino
Our old friend Vinnie P is starting to heat up, with homers in two straight games. Jonathan Cannon looks like he could have some upside for the White Sox, but it’s a complete unknown with this being his first start at the big league level. We don’t have much pitch type data to work with here yet, but we know that Pasquantino is arguably the best power hitter in this lineup against right-handed pitching. He’s the type of guy I want to buy into when he’s seeing the ball well and that appears to be the case these last few games. There’s also 20+ mph winds blowing out to center for this game, providing an added boost to offense.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
