Welcome in to Ben’s Building Blocks for DraftKings & FanDuel! This is a free article written daily to identify my top-overall DFS plays for cash game and small-field contests on both DraftKings and FanDuel. I truly appreciate everyone that reads and supports the content. If you’d like to support further you can click HERE to sign-up for a MLB Premium package. This gets you access to my Core Plays daily — allowing you to tail my builds, access the premium Discord channels and view our DFS Projections Portal. We’ve been on fire already this MLB season, and there’s no better time to sign-up. With that being said, let’s dive into today’s slate…
Above is an example of my MLB Core Plays for the 4/27 slate
Top Pitchers
We have a small four game slate tonight, with what should be extremely concentrated ownership at SP. Spencer Strider is the heavy betting favorite for the NL Cy Young Award right now, and he’s pretty much entered must-play territory each start, at least for cash games. There are very few pitchers in baseball right now who can rival his strikeout upside, and he is so good at generating strikeouts that he can allow a run or two and still smash — especially on a slate like this. You can always make a case to fade someone in MLB DFS, but on a four game slate there really isn’t anyone you can pivot too off Strider. He could have a mediocre game, and still be far and away the highest scoring pitcher so I’ll likely just plug him in and move on. We have him projected for over 70% ownership tonight.
Outside of Strider, it looks like ownership will be settling on Reid Detmers and Aaron Civale, due to their cheap price tags that fit in nicely alongside Strider’s price. I have no issues with either of them, and would lean towards Civale if choosing one. For tournaments, Jose Berrios is interesting to me — and he will likely be very low-owned due to his match-up with the Houston Astros.
Building Blocks
Mike Trout
Trout is in a great spot tonight against the fly-baller Drew Smyly, and I’m going to look to start my main team with both him and Shohei Ohtani. There are some decent value bats to help fit them in, but I always like to one-off or mini-stack power against Smyly and those two fit that build perfectly on Thursday night. Trout has monster numbers over the last few seasons against lefties – and he crushes sinkers which Smyly throws over 40% of the time.
Yan Gomes
Gomes is one of the value plays I like the most tonight – you can make the argument he’s been the Cubs best hitter this season and he’s sporting some huge numbers against lefty pitching. This season, he owns a .467 wOBA and .378 ISO in the split, while Detmers is allowing over 50% hard-hits to right-handed hitters. Gomes 57% hard-hit rate against LHP is among the team-leaders, and I love that he is just $3,000 on DraftKings. We will get some natural leverage as well, with Detmers popping as the second-highest projected owned SP, there is value on Gomes and the rest of the Cubs bats tonight.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
