Welcome everyone to Ben’s Pitching Preview! This season I will be getting back to my roots and focusing on my top SP options for each slate. After all, a SP breakdown was my first ever regular article on this site when I started providing content many years ago.
Our Core Plays have been great to start the season, including a $10,000 win on DraftKings! You can pick up a package here.
Let’s get into it!
Three Aces (again)
We have three strong options at the top tonight in Shane Bieber, Yu Darvish and Walker Buehler. Let’s take a look at their numbers since the start of 2020:
Bieber- 2.53 SIERA, 40.5% strikeouts, 7.5% walks, 17.8% swinging strikes, 34.9% CSW
Darvish- 3.14 SIERA, 31,8% strikeouts, 5.6% walks, 13.6% swinging strikes, 33.7% CSW
Buehler- 3.54 SIERA, 27.1% strikeouts, 4.8% walks, 12.1% swinging strikes, 30.4% CSW
Buehler is clearly third here, but that doesn’t mean he is a bad pitcher whatsoever. When I first opened this slate last night, there wasn’t a single cheap pitcher that stood out to me as a strong cash game/optimal lineup play. We’ve also seen a lot of these totals down from what we saw last season. Pitcher’s have been winning more so than batters early on in 2021. We’ve also dealt with extremely soft-pricing on both sites to begin the season. Last Friday on my biggest night of the season, I was able to fit in a full five man Yankees stack with Shane Bieber and Gerrit Cole. In years past, there hasn’t been as many quality sub-$3,500 hitters available. This is leading me to spend up for SP most nights in both spots, and if you’ve followed my Core Plays this season it’s something I’ve done more often than not. As of Wednesday morning, I’m planning a double-spend on Bieber and Darvish on DraftKings. They both have strong match-ups, and there just aren’t really any guys on this slate below them that I can see putting up a huge K game to match them in points. In tournaments, you can always spend down or get weird with at least one of your SP slots…but as far as my main team, I will continue to spend up while the sites price like this.
Robbie Ray
There is one guy with upside in the mid-tier tonight, however, and it’s Robbie Ray against the Oakland Athletics. Ray has been a peculiar case this season, but there’s no doubts the results have been there. He’s topped 20 DK points in each of his last two games, against respectable offenses in the Rays and Braves. His fastball velocity is way up, but his strikeout rate has been down. His swinging strike rate is right on par with what it has been the last two seasons, so perhaps the K’s will come. One thing that Ray is doing differently this season, has been working ahead in counts and throwing more strikes. This has historically been a wild pitcher, but that hasn’t been the case in 2021. His walk rate is down below 10% for the first time since 2016, and it’s especially noteworthy considering it was over 17% during the shortened season. His zone% is way up as well, sitting at over 46% after not touching 40% over the last three seasons. This match-up vs the A’s is a positive for him as well. While they have power, they have a lot of strikeouts in this lineup. He is the top mid-tier play for me on both sites on Wednesday night.
Note: Freddy Peralta has been really good this season, and does have big-time K upside. That being said, he is too closely priced to the big three for me to consider him as a strong pivot, though I do think he is a completely fine play in GPPs over Buehler.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
