Rejoice. The wait is over. Baseball is back. All 30 clubs have broken camp and are headed to play meaningful games.  A big thanks to Commissioner Manfred and MLB for turning “Opening Night” into “Opening Day and Night” by ditching the traditional one-game opener and giving us a full day of baseball with three games to enjoy. Most importantly, that opens the door for DFS contests one day earlier.
 

And that means the Playbook is back. Our DFS Playbook team will bring you insight, stats, trends and everything in between to help you prepare for your DFS day. Myself, Kenneth Le, Brett Talley, Steve Pimental and Ben Scherr will have something for you each day for the next six months (note: we will hibernate during the four-day All-Star Break to recharge for the second half).
 

We will also provide a daily “Stack the Deck” article to give you some options when considering different stacks. Be sure to check out the new and improved hitting and pitching coaches as well. These are now dashboards with all the information for the day's games, designed to let you navigate and drill down to the metrics that mean the most to you when building your lineups. We’ll provide some notes and interesting tidbits each day to help along the way.
 

Normally, a three game slate in DFS would be a quick one - but this is Opening Day - it's a holiday. So, we’ll have some fun with this, my first Playbook to share with you all.  
 

Early in the season, we will spend a lot of time focusing on the performance from the latter part of the 2016 season and 2017 projections. As the samples from the 2017 season start coming in, we will draw much more and weigh more heavily on those early returns.  For this first Playbook, we’ll give a quick run down of each player we expect to make an impact during this three-game slate and give our recommendations on who you should be targeting when building your lineups.
 

This is one (of the few) that we won’t have many weather concerns to worry about. Especially in Tampa where the dome will ensure nothing is at risk. That will change as the season goes along and the slates get bigger. We’ll be on top of that every day up to first pitch in our lineups tool.  With a short slate and six aces on the bump, it will be important to jump on the right arm(s) and fill in with the bats that have the most opportunity. You’ll see this trend below. You’ll also see quite a few Giants in the write-ups as they have the best chance of putting up some runs if they can get to Greinke and then feast on a less-than stellar back half of the bullpen (hint: stack on the Giants).
 

New for 2017. If you enjoy playing on FanDuel, be sure to note the changes made to the game. They now award points for a quality start (six or more innings pitched AND three or less earned runs) and cut down on the points given for wins. Also, FanDuel is now allowing for “late swap”, which means you can adjust your lineups until each player starts their game. “Roster lock” is no longer an issue but you’ll need to stay on top of it. We’ll be here to help. On that note, FanDuel - just to make things a little more confusing - will still offer “non late swap” contests. Just make sure you understand the difference and know which one you are in.

 

Here is the first installment of the Playbook for the 2017 MLB season. Play ball.

 

Stacks

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