Hey there Fantasy Alarm readers! My name is Kenneth Le, and I am the newest member of the Fantasy Alarm team. I’ll be here to help all of you guys with your DFS MLB, and eventually, help launch Fantasy Alarm’s DFS NHL content!

Over the years, I’ve been able to become a successful DFS player, predominately, by focusing on cash games (e.g. 50/50’s, double-ups, and head-to-head). In fact, I would estimate that 95% of my DFS play is devoted to cash games. They are ultimately the easiest way to win night after night, and best of all, can help supplement your bankroll for GPP’s to give you a shot at a big score.

But enough of that! This article is going to be all about the various strategies and statistics that I utilize to put together the ultimate cash game lineup.

As a point of reference, I’m going to use the main cash game lineup that I utilized on Wednesday’s FanDuel MLB slate, where I felt it was best to fade Clayton Kershaw on a night where he went for 9 IP, 1 ER, 15 K, and 27 FanDuel points.

But first, a disclaimer: The way I approach DFS MLB might be different than the way other experts approach it. My approach has brought me a lot of success, but I’m sure that hundreds of other experts approach it completely differently, and are just as successful or even more successful. In fact, I’m 100% sure that our own Jeff Mans doesn’t approach DFS MLB the exact same way that I do; but in the end, he’s also a successful player, and has accomplished more in his DFS career than 99.9% of the DFS community.

So now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the absolute FIRST thing I look at when putting together my lineup. Starting Pitchers.

On a site like DraftKings or FantasyAces where you have two pitching slots to work with, it’s not going to be as difficult to find your pitchers because you’ll almost always be able to afford a guy like Kershaw by pairing him with a cheaper SP2. On the other hand, on a one-pitcher site like FanDuel, it’s going to be extremely difficult to roster Kershaw and still have free reign at selecting hitters.

There are definitely a ton of resources that I’ll use to determine the best pitcher to use any given night. But to start things off, I like to keep it simple and look at the Vegas Lines. If you aren’t aware, the Vegas Oddsmakers are very good at what they do. The odds that they put together can be viewed as credible “projections” on how the game is going to go on a very macro-level. You can see the list of the Vegas lines from the 9/2 slate below:

Purely looking at the Vegas lines, I found that the biggest favorites of the night were Kershaw, Harvey, Ventura, Dickey, and Kazmir. Also, Hamels is a reasonable favorite in a game with a low O/U.

Since I’ve now narrowed the choices down to six pitchers, I can now look at it a little bit deeper by bringing up the Fantasy Alarm MLB Pitching Coach. The Pitching Coach is a great tool that is only available for DFS Playbook Pro subscribers. The Playbook Pro is only $19.99/month, and I’m not saying that to shill the product. I was a subscriber to the Playbook Pro long before I joined the Fantasy Alarm team. It’s an amazing value that will pay for itself, and with NFL and CFB starting up, it becomes a must have for any DFS player. The MLB Pitching Coach is an amazing tool because it has all of your important pitching ratios right in front of you. It’s also nice to be able to compare and contrast the different salaries for all of the pitchers for each DFS site on one page.

I was able to see that the two biggest favorites, Clayton Kershaw and Matt Harvey, were listed at $13,300 and $11,500 respectively on FanDuel. While it’s definitely possible to find enough value to roster Kershaw or Harvey, it makes me want to take a closer look at a mid-tier value like Yordano Ventura or R.A. Dickey, especially knowing that Coors Field is definitely in play with the 10.5 O/U. But beyond that, I was able to narrow it down even more seeing that Dickey has only a 5.5 K/9 this season. With strikeouts being scored as a premium on all DFS sites, it helps me rule out using Dickey in my cash games.

Another tool that I will use is Fantasy Alarm’s Umpire Report, which is again, only found on the Playbook Pro. Austin Taggart provides one-of-a-kind insight on the umpires assigned to call balls and strikes for all of the games any given night. You can see the slate’s umpire report below:

The important thing that I was able to find through the Umpire Report was that all of our potential candidates (Kershaw, Harvey, and Ventura) had above average umpires assigned to their games, meaning, no one was ruled to be out of consideration.

The next thing I’ll do is look at the recent games tab for all of my possible pitching options. Whether it’s FanDuel, DraftKings, or FantasyAces, you’ll be able to see the last 10-games played for any of the probable pitchers. When I’m choosing a pitcher, I always value a pitcher’s recent play over any other statistic. For instance, are we supposed to really care that Ian Kennedy was 2-5 with a 7.15 ERA in the first two months of the season? Or should we, more so, value the fact that Kennedy has gone 4-3 with a 2.35 ERA since the All-Star Break? A big mistake that players will make is ignore the fine details regarding a player’s stats. Kennedy is the perfect example of it at the pitcher position, but we’ll look at it even deeper when we talk about hitting.

After analyzing the recent games, I was able to narrow the pitching options down to Kershaw, Harvey, and Ventura. All three pitchers are pitching at home, big favorites, and have been phenomenal in their recent games. From there, I examined the likely outcomes in order to determine the best option to go with.

Kershaw is and was obviously the hottest pitcher in baseball, the best overall pitcher, and he definitely had the highest upside. I determined that he was basically a lock for 15 points and the potential to reach the mid-20’s with his upside. Still, I felt that his price tag was going to be brutal my hitting, and he was facing a Giants club that has the 6th lowest strikeout rate in the league, and hadn’t beaten in 3 attempts this season.

Harvey had an August where he shattered records through his 0.33 ERA. Even though the Vegas odds and his recent play would lead you to believe that he was a top-notch play, his salary was still way too high, and he was facing a Phillies team that was averaging 5.77 runs scored in their last 9 games—which was ultimately the reason why we avoided Harvey.

And lastly, looking over Ventura’s stats, outside of his high BB-rate, I found that he had been extremely consistent over his recent games, and playing at a very high-level at Kaufmann Stadium. In fact, over his previous four home starts, he was able to post 15, 18, 12, and 21 FanDuel points respectively. Plus, 3 weeks prior, he dominated the Tigers at home allowing just 2 hits over 6 innings while striking out 8. I ended up projecting Ventura to get somewhere between 14-16 points, with the upside to get to 20.

Given the $4,800 difference in price between Kershaw and Ventura, I felt it was worth the risk to drop down to Ventura. Most of the cash games I entered saw Ventura at 5-10% ownership while Kershaw was around 40-50%.  The underrated thing about going for a pitcher with low ownership and a big savings compared to a high-priced chalky pitcher is that if your pitcher doesn’t do as well he should have, you still have the ability to make up points in order to make it to the money line with your loaded hitting options. For example, if Ventura hypothetically scored 12 and Kershaw hypothetically scored 22, I’m still going to have a reasonable chance to make up the extra 10+ points through my loaded hitting. If it was the other way around, and Kershaw was the one that got 12 points, you can pretty much kiss your night goodbye because John Jaso, Alcides Escobar, and Avisail Garcia just aren’t going to make up that difference, and especially won't make up the difference when you’re going to share a good percentage of these low-level punt plays with other Kershaw owners.

Now that we’ve chosen our pitcher, we can now start inserting our hitting. The first metric that I like to use for hitting is the highly debated, Batter vs. Pitcher. You can count me in as a BvP guy. I can admit that a guy going 2 for 4 with 2 singles isn’t going to do much for me, but if I’m debating between one player or the other, knowing that Player A has a better history against his opposing pitcher than Player B can really help narrow down the options. There are many places to view BvP stats, but FantasyAlarm.com does offer a very convenient Sortable Batter vs. Pitcher tool where you can sort all of the players on any given night by any specific metric. Generally speaking, I like to sort by batting average because it’s pretty simple to just glance at all of the hitters who are hitting over .300, and see if they’ve had a reasonable number of at-bats against that particular pitcher.

Three of the hitters who made our lineup, largely because of their BvP numbers, included Jonathan Lucroy (8 for 21/1 HR vs. Jeff Locke), Jean Segura (8 for 26/1 HR vs. Jeff Locke), and Franklin Gutierrez (9 for 21/3 HR vs. Scott Kazmir).

The great thing about Lucroy, Segura, and Gutierrez is that they pass the test based on at least two of the other metrics that I like to use for hitting. The more things that support each player as a good play any given night, the more likely I’ll have them in my lineup.

a. Recent Play – I found that Lucroy was maintaining a 9 game hitting streak where 5 of those 9 games were multi-hit games. I found that Segura had been averaging a ridiculous 5.08 FanDuel points over his last three games. And lastly, Gutierrez had been an absolute beast in August bringing his batting average from .267 all the way to .303.

b. LHP/RHP Splits – Even though he’s been struggling this season against LHP, Lucroy has shown throughout his career to be a lefty masher with a .304 BA and .352 OBP. Segura was batting .312 vs. LHP this season. And Gutierrez has made a career our of being a beast against lefties including a ridiculous line of .349 BA/.387 OBP/.674 SLG/7 HR.

c. Cost – Lucroy’s FanDuel price has been slowly rising over the last few weeks, but at $3,400 it’s not unreasonable considering there’s the extra $4,800 to play with. Segura was only $2,400, which made him an easy play at shortstop. And finally, Gutierrez’s price was inflated to $3,600, which may be difficult to include if Kershaw was our pitcher, but since I decided to go with Ventura, it ended up being very easy to fit him in. 

As for the other hitters, I always make sure to go over all of these metrics, and make sure that each player is supported by at least two of the metrics if possible. There are also other metrics that I will consider such as OBP (mightily important on FanDuel with the -0.25 for outs), home/road splits, recent play of the opposing pitcher, opposing pitcher’s LHP/RHP splits, and Vegas O/U’s.

For instance, Justin Turner was supported by BvP given he had gone 5 for 10 against Mike Leake in their previous meetings. Plus, he’s been significantly better against RHP this season with a .319 AVG/.378 OBP.

Then there’s DJ LeMahieu who may have had terrible BvP numbers against Chase Anderson, but had been playing extremely well lately, and was facing a pitcher in Anderson who is a right-handed pitcher that struggles against right-handed hitters. Not to mention the park factor upgrade with Coors Field, and his .375 OBP.

In the end, the lineup that I was able to put together was easily able to overcome Kershaw’s best game of the season with our combination of finding the best value of the night at pitcher, and nailing a lot of our hitting picks. Oddly enough, none of the hitters hit home runs, but there were as consistent as it gets. Consistency is absolutely huge when selecting a cash game lineup, and will help you overcome mediocre nights from 1 or 2 of your players (I’m looking at you, Ethier).

When you put the time and effort into your lineups, it gives you the best chance to cash on any given night. Hopefully, this will give you a better idea of how just one successful DFS player approaches their lineup construction, and provide you with some new ways to approach constructing your own cash game lineups.