So today’s slate offers me a chance to discuss an important DFS concept (albeit one that happens more often in Football and Basketball) – chalk eating, or blocking. Simply put, the pitching on this slate makes me want to hurl – get it? Haha. You may think Sean Manaea is the best option by far, but his early season success is buoyed by a .148 BABIP and a 98.2% LOB rate. But he still may be the best option simply because all the other guys are in between hot garbage fire and a good old fashioned regular garbage fire. When you’ve got a situation such as this – a four game slate with absolutely no decent pitching options, you’re faced with the conclusion that the pitching is pretty much RNG – just a matter of which pitcher gets the BABIP-luck that day and the extra strikeout or two. So what to do? Well, you could try to really split hairs and figure out who has that tiny marginal edge over the other pitchers (but to be honest, I’m not even sure that’s possible here or you’re able to even do that with things that are real and meaningful), or, if you’re lucky, there will be something that points to an overwhelmingly chalk pitcher that allows you to block by simply going along with the field such that even if the choice does bad, you’re still in fine shape in cash because you’re in the same boat as 80% of the field. Today we have that in the form of Sean Manaea because of the public’s ridiculous obsession with recency bias and stat chasing. The public is going to see that 9IP, 11K no-hit gem he threw against the Red Sox, and then the 7IP 7K performance he followed it up with, and assume that he’s going to do something like that again. And while it’s certainly possible, we also know that 2 great starts are not nearly as useful for analysis as his entire body of work throughout his career. But that’s irrelevant here – there are no other good options and as such, the cash play here is just to block the field by picking Manaea. That way, no matter what he does, whether he’s on the good side of RNG and ends up the high scoring pitcher or he’s on the bad side of RNG and ends up the worst, you’re in the same boat as the vast majority of the field. I will say that this is a cash-only play. In GPPs, you’d want to do the exact opposite. Simply put, this is a great spot for GPP players in my opinion as there will be a heavily chalk pitcher who is more likely than other chalk pitchers to disappoint; thus, if you pivot to any other pitcher and he out-performs Manaea (something that is entirely within the realm of reasonable possibilities today), you will have a massive lead on the majority of the field and that’s a huge step towards winning a GPP. I will also say that if you do not believe Manaea will be chalky for whatever reason, then you have to go back to picking between garbage fire and hot garbage fire. But if you agree with me that recency bias, stat-chasing and being the best of a bunch of bad options will render Manaea the chalk – pivot in GPPs and block in cash and win all the monies with the bats.

On to the picks…

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