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 Thursday’s starters…
- Pablo Lopez
- Lance Lynn
- Seth Lugo
- Tanner Bibee
This is my list in order of pitchers today.
We have a small four game slate on tap for Thursday which will result in heavy ownership concentration at the SP position. Pablo Lopez is far and away the best arm and talent on this slate, and thus he will be the highest-owned option by far. Cleveland has been hot to start the season, but I’m always going to trust the pitcher in that scenario and Lopez has good historical numbers against the team. This isn’t a spot for a huge K game from him I don’t think – but we don’t have much to work with today and he’s the top play.
For your SP2, most people will be choosing between Lugo and Bibee on DK. My lean is Lugo. He has the better match-up, and while Bibee is an exciting young talent I still think he could take a step back from how great he was down the stretch of last season. He outperformed his metrics pretty significantly — and that’s something I want to monitor for the first month or two of this season.
Building Blocks
MJ Melendez
We absolutely crushed this section in my last article with both Seiya Suzuki and Chris Morel homering. Today, I’m starting with MJ Melendez and the Royals in a great spot against Mike Soroka. Soroka was once a promising young arm for the Atlanta Braves, but he has struggled to stay healthy and struggled on the mound over the last few years. We barely saw him in 2023, but the results weren’t great mainly because he wasn’t able to generate ground balls at the clip we’ve seen from him when he was producing. That carried over into his first start of 2024, where he allowed four runs across five innings with 0 strikeouts. I’m going to be attacking him until I see any sign of life – and the Royals offense has been hot to start the season. They have four players over 13% barrels/PA and that includes Melendez. He matches up very well with Soroka’s pitch mix, and I think he is viable in all formats on Thursday.
Jack Suwinski
Suwinski nabbed his first homer of the season last night and it was off a lefty to boot! He hasn’t been in the lineup much to begin the season due to the amount of lefties the Pirates ran into – and he will benefit from playing everyday vs these right-handed arms. He is the type of hitter that can get hot in a hurry, and it was encouraging to see him blast one out last night off a same-handed pitcher. We know the story with Josiah Gray at this point — he was really bad two years ago and better last season – though better doesn’t tell the full story. Gray vastly outperformed metrics last season, and he profiles as someone that’s going to give up HR’s. Suwinski had the highest ISO on the Pirates vs RHP last season and appears to be the top value play on the slate for me.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
