Saturday’s games gives us intriguing SP options with Bauer, Alfredo Simon, and Anthony DeSclafani. Heading that list is Trevor Bauer with his clever and catchy Twitter handle, @BauerOutage. All three of these SP’s have started 2015 very strong. Today’s match-ups really have me focused on whether they are legit SP’s in DFS, or have they just got off to lucky starts. I’ll continue to say your two SP’s need to be strikeout pitchers. Meaning, don’t play a pitcher that has far less K’s per IP, or has a high WHIP. Go ahead and pay the big bucks for the SP’s. However, you can’t always start two SP’s that are $10,000+ and will eat up a huge portion of your salary. The aforementioned SP’s prices have good value. But my biggest struggle is, do I keep plugging them in or are they going to get destroyed by a good opponent? Of the three, Bauer is the only pitcher that at one point was a top pitching prospect. He was highly touted out of UCLA, and the Diamondbacks drafted him third overall in the 2011 MLB Draft. Bauer also won the Golden Spikes Award as the nation’s top amateur player. The Diamondbacks gave up on him pretty fast and traded him to the Cleveland Indians. He’ll get his biggest test of 2015 today against the Detroit Tigers. Anthony DeSclafani was once a top prospect in the Marlins organization, and was a key piece to the trade involving Mat Latos. He pitched 33 Innings for the Marlins in 2014, and those numbers are not impressive at all. So if you want to rollout a SP whose name you can’t pronounce, don’t look it up. Realize that he isn’t an ultra-talented rookie that has come out of nowhere. The player I can’t help but compare him to the most is Jacob deGrom. Like DeSclafani, deGrom was somewhat of a top prospect in the Mets organization, but no one expected this type of skill at the major league level. It’s still too early to make that comparison, but DeSclafani’s hot start has me thinking in that direction. As for Alfredo Simon, he came on last year with the Cincinnati Reds. His overall numbers in 2014 were good, but he fizzled out a bit at the end. Now with the Tigers in 2015, he’s off to another good start, and although the Indians haven’t looked great so far, it’ll be a good match-up to see if Simon is a legit DFS option every week. Don’t be afraid to start two SP’s that face each other, as Bauer and Simon do today. Although you would only be able to potentially get one win, if the strikeouts pile up, so will your DraftKings score.
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Please, blog, may I have some more?