DraftKings contributor Garion Thorne and RotoWire’s Erik Halterman join The Sweat to give their favorite DraftKings value plays for today’s MLB slate.
Watch the entire MLB segment below!
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Video Transcript
Garion Thorne:
Erik mentioned we are often on the same page, and we were on the same page just a little bit earlier. I’m going with Spencer Strider as my value play. I won’t spend too much time on this because Erik laid it out beautifully, but I will say two things that he did not mention. One, 87 pitches was that last outing for Strider, so if we are talking about getting him to that five inning benchmark, I think you can probably say he’s fully built up and could go 100 pitches. So even with the walks kind of eating up some of that efficiency, I think he does get to five innings tonight. And also, Strider brings so much strikeout potential by himself. We don’t necessarily have to mention this, but the Pirates have the highest strikeout rate in baseball across the past two weeks, up over 27 percent. We could see some ridiculous strikeout numbers from Strider tonight.
Erik Halterman:
I like Joey Votto at $3900. Not quite a bargain basement kind of guy, but he’s priced as if his season-long 109 wRC+ is all who he is, and that’s not all he is. He was awful to start the season, a 31 wRC+ before he came down with COVID in early May. Over that stretch, he had a 32% strikeout rate, a barrel rate under 7%, just looked completely lost. But since he’s returned, a 200 wRC+, that barrel rate is all the way up at 17.6%, and the strikeout rate is down to 18%.
We’re seeing some of the best Joey Votto we’ve ever seen. He’s riding an eight-game hitting streak right now too, and I think he also changed his bat. He was experimenting with a new knob on the end of his bat. He’s famously a constant tinkerer, and I guess that tinkering just didn’t work, but he’s already moved past it and he’s looking like a totally different player now. If that first stretch didn’t happen and he just started the year in late May when he returned from the COVID-19 injured list, he’d be a lot more expensive than $3900 here, especially against Andre Pallante, not a particularly big prospect, spent most year in relief, has a very good ERA but none of the ERA estimators back it up—a 1.23 ERA, but most ERA estimators are above four. Doesn’t really strike out anybody, walks too many guys, he’s just a ground ball pitcher. I think Votto should be in for another good day here.
Garion’s Pick: Spencer Strider ($7,000)
Erik’s Pick: Joey Votto ($3,900)
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