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DFS Underpriced Studs! Starting Pitcher Picks For 8/15
Alright RotoBaller's, time for a reality check! Is your fantasy baseball team so far out of it you barely want to log in every day and set your lineup? The thing is, we know you have so much fantasy baseball knowledge, and you probably even downloaded RotoBaller's FREE iPhone waiver wire app to make sure you know who's hot and who to drop all season long. Well have no fear, we have the perfect solution for you fellow RotoBallers and fantasy baseball freaks.
Enter daily league fantasy baseball on sites like Fanduel and Draftkings, where you can use your accrued knowledge of MLB & fantasy baseball to compete each and every night from scratch, with a new roster full of your favorite hitters and pitchers for that specific day. No more worrying about two start pitchers, or the closer carousel, and best of all, the fluke injury bug that hits at the most inopportune moment!
Simply draft your roster (slightly different style on both of our favorite sites) using their salary cap based system. Then just sit back and enjoy the games for that night while you watch your team rack up fantasy points similarly to most head to head scoring formats! With these types of leagues, you can leave the hopelessness of your season long fantasy formats aside, and focus on the two months of fantasy baseball action. We recommend throwing a dollar into the pool for a large field tournament, or even going up against a fellow friend in a heads up competition (for money or bragging rights), but either way, why not get your beak wet and see what all the fuss is about.
Editors Note: If you want an even greater edge over your FanDuel and DraftKings competitors, check out RotoBaller’s highly effective Daily League Fantasy Baseball Lineup Picks Newsletter. In this simple-to-use cheat sheet format, we provide you a minimum of 20 daily league player recommendations, three days a week (Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday), throughout the fantasy baseball season. Also be sure to check your matchups, and analyze sit/start options each and every day, using our new MLB batters vs. pitchers (BvP) matchups tool!
Have you been following our picks for the past few weeks? If so, tell a friend to tell a friend, because you know that RotoBaller has it going on with our DFS game!
Alright fellow RotoBallers, without further ado, let’s get right to the beef & broccoli and DFS tarting pitcher sleepers for 8/15/14:
FanDuel Lineup Recommendation for 8/15
![By Keith Allison from Owings Mills, USA [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://dev.rotoballer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Danny-Duffy-Kansas-City-Royals-MLB-News-150x150.jpg)
Danny Duffy, KC ($7,100) - Tell a friend to tell a friend, because Daniel Duffy is coming into tonight's action with a sparkling 2.57 ERA, 7 wins and 91 strikeouts in 115.2 innings pitched thus far in 2014. Yes, you read that all correctly; this dude has been money in the bank since he took a spot in the starting rotation.
Facing the not so powerful Twins lineup, especially versus left handed pitchers (only 24 bombs versus lefties all year long for the entire roster), the former pedigree prospect will be looking to help his team secure a playoff birth down the stretch.
Because of all of the above aforementioned reasons (forget about the boring sabermetrics that obviously also hold up), we are looking towards this underpriced talent to strike some Fanduel gold tonight.
Please note that Duffy is NOT our #1 SP pick for the night (feel free to subscribe to our newsletter to get the full, unabridged cheat sheet and sleeper picks), however, based on our value based recommendation system, he is poised to return huge for any owners willing to make the $7,100 investment. Therefore, "Double D" can be a super sneaky large field tournament play without all the risk of running out the guys priced around 6K.
DraftKings Starting Pitcher Recommendation for 8/15
![By SD Dirk on Flickr [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://dev.rotoballer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Madison-Bumgarner-MLB-fantasy-baseball-starting-pitchers-150x150.png)
Madison Bumgarner, SF ($9,200) - Less of a sleeper and more of a steal, the Mad-Bum is the 10th most expensive priced starting pitcher tonight on DraftKings. This is immediately where we tell you that someone at the lovely company we call DraftKings must have fat fingered the keyboard and put an 8 where there was supposed to be 9 or a 10.
Averaging a very hearty 18.5 FPPG over his last ten starts is a nice way to open up this portion of our recommendation, but let's also immediately account for the well known fact the he is literally one of the best overall pitchers in baseball, hands down. Perennially underrated in season long formats, it seems this trend has trickled into the DFS gaming recently as one of the NL's best young aces is more affordable than unproven and volatile starters like James Paxton and Tanner Roark (It's over pronounced "Roar-Ek" in case you care as much as I do about the color of my girl's toe nail polish - ZERO).
Net, net, bottom line: No need to get too cute tonight on DraftKings when you can simply pair up 2 underpriced studs like Bumgarner and Lynn (versus the horrificly strikeout prone Padres), to rack up some tremendous totals in your tournaments and cash games.
The DFS Strategic Wrap Up
On most nights, and on all sites, the key to any successful DFS gaming strategy is to try to “buy low,” to unearth some undervalued talent using split stats or favorable player platoons. Sometimes sites just miss something in their algorithm and you can find a glitchy play (like when Hunter Pence was flukily dropped to $2,200 on FanDuel earlier this season). Although predicting the outcomes of baseball games can be extremely tough (if not borderline impossible), using a smart, proven, analytical process, and good sabermetric data to back up our intuition gives us the edge we need to make incremental gains over our competitors.
We can’t stress this point to you enough so we’ll say it yet again: if you haven’t experienced the thrill of drafting a new fantasy team every night and competing for just one day, then you have no idea what you're missing! We highly suggest you join in on the fun, especially if you are one of the unfortunate souls who has had a tough go at it in seasonal fantasy baseball formats. Whether the injury bug bit your team, or whether your draft didn't live up to your expectations (and hype), you now have a fantastic option (and reason) to keep playing fantasy baseball for the rest of the year.
Good luck today playing your DFS games tonight, RotoBallers!
