Thought I may have had a good night, lots of low% Franco and Coghlan, overweight Seager and Castillo. Nice pitching mix, neutral at worst



Oh I see Granderson was 14.6% owned in the slam, that explains it. I don't get it, but that explains it.


Day 20

Buyins $1760, Payout $812, -$948

Season -$1367



I'll be playing both slates tomorrow. The season is getting into a more normal flow as there wont be any day slates Mon, Tue, Wed, or Fri again next week.

lot of ball left to be played here, but I'll take a nice start








Now today Hou will score 17

So when I posted my little sweat earlier I was up about $3K with a legit shot at a $10K slate (on $500 worth of action ) Needless to say everything bad that could happen did, mainly 72000 points from Rasmus, and everything good that could have happened didn't (big game from Betts probably wins me the Squeeze, Springer and Correa could've helped a lot, I had several teams well into the cash with full 4 man Bos stacks that hadn't even started yet). I was following along as I hammered out my 7pm lineups and it seemed like my payout went down $100 every time I checked, with the late Rasmus RBI double being a $1000 hit at the end. Despite decent results I was tilting pretty hard at another "just missed" in the middle of this frustrating down swing. Then I got to thinking bigger picture and just kinda laughed at myself. Mon could have just as easily been a $5K day as a $1600 day, and today could have just as easily been a $10K+ day as a $1700 day. Friday night's results had me shaking my head in disgust as well, then I got to looking at %'s and suddenly I got to feeling a lot better about my long term prospects again. One negative about this thread is it has me dwelling on day to day results way too much. I'm usually pretty good at just putting it behind me, instantly. It's a little harder when you're writing about it after the fact, reminding myself about it in the meantime. It'll probably be more fun once I start winning though.









I had way too much Fernandez and Wacha tonight and a lot more Coors exposure than I usually do, all total failures. Tons of Odubel/Franco helped, 2 mostly overlooked studs playing for a minor league team.





Day 21

Buyins $1051, Payout $2512, +$1461

Season +$94 back in black


Tomorrow it's build lineups from 9am-4pm, then work outside until dark.

Crazy day in baseball! I doubt I've ever had so many shares of so many HR's. Then again so did everyone else, huge scores.



No wins, but a few close ones:









Good results this weekend, which is obviously nice, but even more importantly I think I'm back in the right state of mind after slipping into a bit of tilt over the last week or so. Now I feel like I'm ready to go on a run and take some bigger **** down. When the next swong starts (could be tomorrow, could be 2, 3 months from now) Someone remind me to suck it up and power through if I get whiny.



Day 22

Buyins $1315, Payout $4204, +$2889

Season +$2983


I didn't mention the Ari pen Fri or Sat because they had a couple more uneventful games and I was thinking they were close enough to being rested not to mention it. Here's Fri and Sat





Wagner eating all those innings Thur really bailed them out, and the rest of the week since Mon was fairly smooth sailing. What Ari didn't need was yet another starter getting knocked out early, on top of another extra inning slugfest, well that's what they got today.



They've overused Wagner in a big way since his Mon call-up. 10 or 11 innings I think in a week, sick. They've used Marshall almost every day since his Sun call-up as well. Still, it wasn't enough to keep the core fresh with Mon and Today's games. They need Greinke to pitch deep tomorrow in a bad way or it could get ugly. Several other pens in various states of disarray as well. I'll post more about them when I become as familiar with the situations, it's a lot of work.

Boring night. I made a few Det stacks, but didn't use Cabrera otherwise. The problem with stacking so much is you almost always use that team's first baseman so you really have to pick and choose who to use when a 1bman isn't a part of a stack. Tonight I mostly used Abreu.





For Tue there's 2 teams that are jumping off the screen at me, might gambool it up a bit and just hammer out 100 stacks each with a lot of both teams mixed together, as much as possible at least. Actually 1st is the only overlapping issue.



Day 23

Buyins $1530, Payout $1265, -$265

Season +$2718


Ari made some unsurprising roster moves today, use em' up, send em' down:



16 innings in a week out of Wagner and Marshall. They'll be back later in the year alright, if their arms don't fall off.


I don't think Greinke got knocked around as badly as his line looks (and no walks) but still probably pulled after 5 if they weren't so desperate to save the pen. He did, and even got the win! to go along with his 7 earnies

I like the slate and FD is running a $300K Monster tonight so taking a little shot:

Gl boss

reading your blog here really quietly but today i had to register. keep up the good work. Nice to read

Thanks guys. The process was going nice and smooth until 6pm. The sky turned black and the wind kicked up. Out here in the country that always means the same thing, power went out. Of course I hadn't edited my $300's or $25's yet so I was just about to start cancelling everything on my phone when it kicked back on at 6:15, now it's a mad rush to edit all my higher stake games in 45 minutes. Had about 10 more to go at 6:45 when it really turned black and the wind really kicked up, mad dash to beat the power outage now... Then I hear a loud crash on the roof, look outside and a 200 year old 10 ton tree blew right over in my back yard, lol. Thankfully just a few big chunks hit the roof. Everything seems fine now, besides the 10 tons of garbage in my yard.

So anyways I was in a bit of a rush but pretty happy with how most of my lineups turned out. Here's the Monster entries:

Hey OP, have you seen this? It's hilarious, thought you'd get a kick out of it.

I can't get it to play.

After looking at the Det box score and seeing Martinez/Upton's 0-8 I figured I bricked my $300 entries, and I did. Using both players on all 3 "shots" isn't really my MO, but like I said I was in a bit of a hurry, and I was all over those guys so no ragre3ts. Mixed results besides that:





back on that horse tomorrow, I really hate the pitching btw


Day 24

Buyins $2680, Payout $1910, -$770

Season +$1948

Most nights I'd be pretty happy with this result, not tonight because it feels like I nailed everything. Somehow don't have any Col stacks with Pedroia or JD Martinez, and I used those guys a ton. I used Cano more than Pedroia, and he had a good game as well but Pedroia for him on any one of my top teams and I'm doing the jig right now. Game of inches.





Day 25

Buyins $1630, Payout $3031, +$1401

Season +$3349


Tomorrow's schedule absolutely sucks! 4 day games, rain in all 4 forecasts. I'm skipping that headache. 4 night games, 2 at 7pm, 2 at 10pm. One of the 7pm games looks like a rain game (CWS@BAL) so it could end up being a 3 game slate with 4/6 of the lineups coming out late. I'll check the weather in Bal a couple times tomorrow, if it looks better I might throw together a few lineups between 5-7pm. If it looks more like rain I'm taking the day off, which probably isn't the worst idea in the world anyway. It'll be a DGAF light volume day at most.

Enjoying the thread, keep it up.

Bal looks like a go so I'll be donking around a bit tonight:




Maeda looks like the obvious chalk tonight, hopefully the touts talk him up to 60%+ because I'm pretty sure I'll be zagging.

I guess I was serious about this being a DGAF day, lots if first or last type long shots, like these:








I didn't notice Bucholz had Atl at home tonight when I mentioned Maeda being the chalk. Between the 2 that should keep Fernandez reasonably low %

Decent night considering I don't play guys like Rubby De La Rosa:




Even if that hadn't happened I was probably 1 or 2 big hits away from making any real noise:




Day 26

Buyins $550, Payout $704, +$154

Season +$3503


Building 150 Fri lineups tonight, 2 down, 148 to go. If I don't have to scrap half of it it'll give me more time to work on my higher stakes stuff.

Boring night but I had enough Bour and an above avg pitching mix to make it a small winner:

















Day 27

Buyins $2134, Payout $2554, +$420

Season +$3923


Split slate tomorrow and I'll be playing both

I didn't have much of a feel for the day slate so I kept it low stakes. I used 100% deGrom, and about 3% Conforto. The first part of that worked out well, Conforto blew up again and was around 35% owned? Bahh





-$377 on day shift


Lots of shares of 1% owned Miley (CGSO, but only 4 K's) saved me from a losing night:





Day 28

Buyins $1265, Payout $926, -$339

Season +$3584


Lots of rain in the early east coast games so there's a total of 4 lineups I'll be focusing on. I'd like to play Kershaw 100% but there wont be enough viable combos. I'll have to save it for another day.

hope you had 100% kershaw. Looking really strong until now

I ended up around 50% Kershaw, 30% Schrezer (who was almost as good) and 20% random grunts. This was my best score today:




I couldn't have possibly asked for more from Kershaw or the Mil players, Longo and Trout chipped in as well, my fill in plays OTOH were hot garbage. I'm guessing I have many lineups that look a lot like this one because I ran a ship load of Mil stacks out there, mostly with Kershaw or Max and I still got hammered:













On the bright side Kershaw was only 25-30% owned in the games I played today, even better of the 70% of teams that didn't use him only 3% found their way to Max. Not a perfect match up, but the clear #2 play, IMO.



Day 29

Buyins $970, Payout $357, -$613

Season +$2971

Sun was a pretty light day for me. Woke up at 10am and cranked out lineups until 2pm, took a 2 hour nap, went out to dinner, came home and took another 2 hour nap. So anyways I'm well rested and I've got some free time, which feels weird. I was doing some reading and kicking the tires on Mon night's slate a bit when I decided to dig into my pre-season notes on bull pens seeing as I finally have a few minutes and I've been putting it off. Thought I'd share.

First, here's all 30 pens sorted by innings as of Sun. I circled the ERA of the worst 10 by Fangraphs pre-season WAR projections, along with Col and Mil.




Not surprising to see Ari way ahead (behind really) in IP. Not as bad as it looks though as a good chunk of those innings were eaten by guys called up from the minors, used up (RIP Wagner, never forget he used to have an arm hanging from that empty socket) and sent back down.


TB and Sea pens are doing fine and haven't been worked hard at all, mostly irrelevant as those are the 2 least likely targets of these 12 teams due to mostly decent+ starting pitching and 2 of the best pitchers parks in the AL.


The other 10 teams are all favorite targets of mine to begin with mostly due to weak starting pitching and/or hitters parks (5 check both boxes) Them having terrible and/or overworked pens is just a little extra icing on the cake. Not at all surprising to see all 10 of these pens in the top half of IP, with mostly bad numbers to boot. These things have a way of snowballing. The bad starter gets knocked out early, the bad pen comes in and throws more pitches than it should because they came into the game earlier than a team with good SP's. Now the next day they're bad and fatigued, next starter gets knocked out early because he sucks and his park just gave up 2 HR's that would have been outs most places, pen comes in tired and bad and gives up 5 runs, now they're more tired, or the team is forced to make multiple moves, like ARI (calling up even worse minor league pitchers). You get the idea.


So looking at my notes for current or soon to be interesting situations, there's a few but 1 really jumps out.


Cin This bull pen is bad:





1 WAR is the worst rest of season projection for all 30 teams, their closer is projected for negative WAR (lol), they've thrown the 3rd most innings so far, they have by far the worst ERA, They've already given up 21 home runs, 4 more than 2nd worst, terrible Mil.

The rotation is a mess, and already injury riddled:




All those green crosses mean hurt, and that's their 1,2,3,6,7 starters. So for now they're running out their 4,5,8,9,10 absolutely brutal!


To top it all off here comes the scheduling quirk gremlins. If my notes are right they play April 13- July 6 with 5 days off, yes 80 games in 85 days.


So I follow the league closely enough to know that Cin was worth targeting well before digging in deeper tonight, but I didn't have a full grasp on just how bad the situation was. That's the main point of this, not for any players following this thread to know they should hammer away at Cin (tho they should, I'll be going after this mess all summer) more about how you can find real actionable information by digging into the numbers.


Quick note on the Ari pen, they finally get a day off today after 20 in a row. Tomorrow starts 16 more before the next day off. I'll be watching these bums.

Night didn't start out great as I checked Rotoworld a minute too late to do anything with this piece of news:




yeah, that was my most used player so I knew at 7:06 that it was just a matter of how much I lose tonight, lol.




Not the end of the world.


Day 30

Buyins $1655, Payout $897, -$758

Season +$2213


Cincinnati bull pen lived down to my expectations tonight:





That wasn't mop up duty either, they were up 6-3 when Finnegan got pulled.


I would have played some Posey tonight regardless but I definitely put my money where my mouth was on the issue as I stacked Posey/Pence/Duffy when I probably wouldn't have otherwise. I even used some Pence and Duffy in my regular rotation and I know I wouldn't have selected either one of them before seeing how grim it's getting in Cinci. My 3 didn't do much of the damage BTW, but they were the right guys to play.

I donked around a little with the dumb 6pm slate:



-$82


After looking at a few box scores around 10pm I thought I could be on my way to a -100% day so needless to say I'm pleasantly surprised by the actual results:




I guess A lot of Arrieta and Puig with some decent LAD stacks was enough to save me. I really had some dogs, too much Harvey and a ton of ofers. My best lineup:




I'm not going to call this a just miss like the lineup I posted a couple days ago because it didn't have 3 total dud players mixed in with monsters, but lets just say the difference between finishing 1-4 out of 48,000 ($10K, $6K, 3k, 2k) and 22/48,000 ($250) can be minuscule. I see a lot of complaining on RG about these top heavy structures and it's easy to get the frustration when you go on a run of several 99.9 percentile scores w/o really cashing anything significant, but then you hit a couple and learn to understand it's all just a waiting game (this doesn't include the ridiculous 30%+ to first payouts DK is so fond of. I hate that crap and refuse to play them.). Play within your roll, if you've got the skill you'll get the money sooner or later.



Day 31

Buyins $1852, Payout $2714, +$862

Season +$3075


I'm skipping the early slate tomorrow.


bull pen notes-

Cin pen lost another game, they're bad, nice start from Lamb tho.




Ari quickly back to old tricks after their day off




The rotation just isn't getting it done and this weak bull pen is starting to bear the brunt. Gonna be a long summer for those boys.

I've been overweight full Hou stacks, Correa, Springer, and the two of them together since the season started, especially the Correa/Springer combo, this has cost me thousands. So ff to tonight and I really like their odds at home vs Phil "homers allowed" Hughes, ALLIN!! Not really all in but I was heavily invested. First box score I look at:




Well that's not the 2-1 pitchers duel or 8-1 Hou loss I've come to expect. First thought 'If Mike Leake threw a gem I'm up $10K'




Mother Bitch!!!! OK, maybe Smyly:




Meh as it gets, last hope Fernandez:




Decent start, but not what I was hoping for. He and Smyly were both 30% owned so I really needed it to be Leake for the sure thing. Anyway I still had a lot of hope, check results:




I've been waiting a month for Correa to go off, he finally does, and I win $84 All part of the sick and twisted game that is MLB DFS.


Day 32

Buyins $1300, Payout $1384, +$84

Season +$3159



FD is running a $300K Rally ($5 buyin) tomorrow, so I plan on maxing out my entries on that with 250. 1 problem, deGrom is the only pitcher I'd even think about using tomorrow and the forecast for SD of all places looks iffy. I'm just going to plod along as if all systems are go until and if it looks worse tomorrow afternoon. In that case I'd probably just pull the plug as I'm not going to make 250 lineups and cancel them all at 6:30. We'll see how it looks when I get up.

The forecast for SD still looked pretty iffy around 3pm est so I had 3 options.

1) Gamble on the pitcher I want to use not getting rained out. I don't do that

2) Take the day off. I don't do that either, but I probably should have.

3) Throw some **** pitchers at the wall and see if anything sticks. dingdingding we have a winner.


I ended up on Hendricks, Happ, Ross, and Conley. The group had as many wins (3) as runs allowed tonight. No big K games but JFC let's not get too greedy here. deGrom didn't get rained out after all, but he did in fact suck, hard. So for all the pissing and moaning I do about the weather (mostly to myself) I must admit that even though it didn't rain it really helped me out tonight. deGrom was around 35% BTW. What I didn't have was a single share of a single Col player, and they scored 13 runs in 1 inning, so, game over man. No idea what my results were before that inning as I refuse to check before it's all over anymore, but I'm sure I was at least even/small winner.




I don't feel too bad because if I had run all deGrom I probably go -100%, OTOH to get so lucky with 4 garbage pitchers and still have a big loser is beyond frustrating.


Day 33

Buyins $1250, Payout $564, -$686

Season +$2473



After a quick scan of the slate tomorrow I decided it was prime for taking a shot at the $500K Slam. This is what I'm doing as of now:




Then I dug in a bit more and I'm not so sure I like the slate as much anymore. I'm probably too stubborn to cancel anything but if I can't get a better feel for it after 25 or so lineups I might cancel some. I was thinking 200 or 250 entries before I noticed the payouts BTW. 20% to 1st and 8% to 2nd isn't egregious or anything but it's a little too steep for me to go that high of a % of my BR.