Daily Fantasy Baseball News and Updates for FanDuel and DraftKings - 8/25/16

Welcome to the daily MLB updates and news article. We'll try and update it right up to line-up locks with as much information as comes across our desks.

Last night's picks can be found here, so you can wrap your mind around what you need to be looking at before lineups lock today.

By the way - we keep our projection system updated with all of the batting lineup changes as they occur throughout the day right up until lineup lock. Every day. If you want access to that system so you can cut out a lot of the research element, click the button below!

What We Know

It's Thursday, so the slate is on the light side, but there's still plenty to like on tonight's nine-gamer. We've also got a pair of early games on tap, and the lineups are coming in for those, so let's get to it.

Personnel

• Cameron Maybin is getting the day off, with Tyler Collins hitting second in his absence.
• Rookie phenom Andrew Benitendi is out of the lineup today after leaving last night with a leg injury. He's scheduled to undergo an MRI today.
• David Ortiz will take the day off. Aaron Hill will land at 3B, with Travis Shaw at 1B and Hanley Ramirez at DH in the corner spot shuffle for the Red Sox.
• Bryan Holaday is getting the call behind the plate today as Sandy Leon gets a breather.
• Jay Bruce left last night's game with a calf issue and is considered day-to-day.
• Nelson Cruz was removed yesterday due to back spasms. His status for tonight remains unclear as of this morning.
• Kyle Seager missed yesterday's game after fouling a ball off his foot on Tuesday. He could to the lineup as early as tonight.
• Carlos Gomez is expected to join the Rangers today. We'll have to wait and see if/how they plan to use him, though.
• Devon Travis sat again last night. He's dealing with a finger injury and is considered day-to-day for now.
• Tim Beckham will be on the bench today as he continues to deal with a hamstring issue that forced him out of Tuesday's game.

Tournament Stacks

Toronto Blue Jays
If you read the picks column, or if you are in any way familiar with the post-2014 work of Jered Weaver, you probably knew this is where we were going tonight. The positives for the Blue Jays are obvious: Weaver has one of the worst K rates in MLB, gives up nearly 2 HRs/9, the Blue Jays are one of the league's top power-hitting teams, and Rogers Centre is a great place to hit. To find a negative for Toronto in this matchup, you've really got to squint. Yeah, the Blue Jays have been pretty average over the last week or so, but to put greater weight on that than the reams of data their hitters have produced over exponentially longer periods of time would be a mistake. Of course, there's no such thing as a guarantee in baseball (or DFS), but the odds favor work accumulated over large sample sizes, so there's really only two reasons we can come up with to fade the Jays: 1. Price, because they're really high on DraftKings, 2. Contrarianism.

Seattle Mariners

If you're looking to pivot off of Toronto in search of lower ownership, you've got some options, as nearly every game tonight features at least one offense in a nice spot. Tentatively, we're siding with the Mariners as our top secondary option. Our commitment to the pick hinges a good deal on Kyle Seager returning to the lineup, because we're extremely high on lefties going against Anthony Ranaudo, one of the few guys in baseball who manages to miss fewer bats than Jered Weaver. The 26-year-old has only 69 innings of big-league work under his belt, but what we've seen during that time has been unequivocally terrible: 4.30 Ks/9, 4.88 BB/9, 2.22 HR/9, 6.11 xFIP. It's hard to imagine doing worse than that and still finding a team willing to put you on the mound every five days or so. It's also bad enough that we'd be willing to use just about anybody against him, given the right game format, price and lineup slot, but we're showing heavy preference for lefties, given the natural platoon splits that have to be assumed when dealing with sample sizes as small as Ranaudo's.

 

Sneaky Pitcher

Adam Wainwright

The fact that you may have been expecting to see Robbie Ray's name here is one of the biggest reasons that you don't. We like him, but you're gonna catch anybody surprise if you plug him in your GPP lineups tonight. After striking out 13 Padres over seven innings of one-run ball last time out, he now ranks third in MLB (!) with 11.19 Ks/9 and he'll probably be extremely popular in tournaments. Meanwhile, Wainwright is projected for nearly as many points, and won't cost you as much (the discount is especially on stark on DraftKings). Of course, Wainwright's ceiling is substantially lower, but given Ray's lingering inconsistency and tough pitcher's park, we think Wainwright might actually be the safer play. That might seem at odds with his struggles over the last month or so, but we saw enough from May-July to make us believe the skills that once made him an ace have completely deserted him yet. We also feel pretty good about the matchup with the Mets (93 wRC+ vs. RHP), especially if Jay Bruce is out.

 

The "Every Lineup" Guys

Max Scherzer

With due respect for the Orioles, there's simply not a better place to go for cash games tonight. Baltimore has one of the league's most powerful offenses and Scherzer has been know to get burned by a homer or two every once in a while, but we're willing to live with that given everything else he does well. Most notably, that includes striking guys out at an elite rate (11.22/9) and working deep into games, which helps rack up points and boosts the probability he'll walk out with a win. Speaking of which, the fact that the Nats are -220 favorites can't go unmentioned. That's huge on sites like FanDuel that reward wins with big points. Another thing to keep in mind when you're weighing the risk Baltimore brings: the game is in D.C., so the Birds are getting a negative park shift and losing the benefit of the DH.

Bryce Harper

I really thought it would be Josh Donaldson I'd be writing up here, but nothing stands in the way of the projection system's love of Bryce Harper (or of picking on Ubaldo Jimenez). The Baltimore righty is walking well over 5 per 9 this year, which is bad, even by Ubaldo standards. The one thing he still does fairly well is limit HRs, but we're not overly concerned. For one thing, Harper's coming cheap on FanDuel, almost to the point that we don't need a big game to return value. For another, Jimenez has been working out of the bullpen lately, and he'd gone beyond the fifth inning only once in his last 10 starts before getting demoted. So the Baltimore relievers should be logging significant work, and that's a good thing for the Nats, because while Zach Britton is great, the rest of the bullpen is pretty bad, especially with Darren O'Day on the shelf. Even with their closer logging a 2.05 xFIP over 52 IP, the Orioles still rank near the bottom third of the league in bullpen xFIP at 4.22 on the season. Ok, so I didn't say much about the actually hitter here, did I? You probably know what you need to know about Harper already, but if you're interested in learning why we continue to be so high on the guy, see last night's picks column.

One other note: There are big differences between DraftKings and FanDuel pricing so the optimal lineups are looking quite different.

These are players that show up in each of the top 10 lineups as produced by our lineup optimizer. This doesn't necessarily mean that they're "safe," it just means that their projected weighted-mean point total is a solid building block for a great lineup foundation today.

Good luck out there today! If you want access to all of our numbers, get started with a free trial below of our lineup optimizer, on us!