The daily grind: 7-19-13

The Daily Grind provides daily match-up advice for tinkerers and daily fantasy players. I welcome advice to help make this column more effective, including notice of impending weather events, new injuries, and changes to platoon situations. Ownership rates are from Yahoo!

The daily picks are a mixture of Daily League specific advice and information for the more typical fantasy owner.

The weekend column will forego hitter recommendations in order to provide three days of pitcher insights.

Today’s weather watch

Colorado and Chicago (AL) may see some scattered storms today, but the rest of the league is in the clear.

Today’s grind

All flavors are available today. Take a taste.

Tomorrow’s grind

Pitcher (to start): Zack Wheeler has looked better in recent starts, but he’s still a dangerous choice for streaming, even against a tepid Phillies offense.

Corey Kluber is the pick of the day against the Twins. On a team with more exposure than the Indians, he would have an ownership rate above 80 percent. As it stands, only 23 percent of owners see the value in a strikeout per inning, few walks, and a tidy sub-4.00 ERA.

Nathan Eovaldi doesn’t strikeout many, but he’s a solid pitcher. The Brewers are struggling a bit with offense, which could help. This is a bigger reach than Wheeler.

Wade Miley is 41 percent owned, which is almost twice as high as Kluber. Does that make a lick of sense? In any case, Miley’s match-up against the Giants is favorable.

Dan Straily is another reach option. His match-up with the Angels is worth avoiding.

Pitcher (bum): Remember when Edinson Volquez was dead nasty unhittable? That’s historical trivia now. The Cardinals are liable to thump him pretty bad.

Ross Wolf has a shiny 2.14 ERA and a scouting report that makes you wonder how that’s even remotely possible. He’ll need to improve his Aaron Cook-quality strikeout rate (2.41 K/9) in order to get out of the exploit category.

Sunday’s grind

Pitcher (to start): Chris Archer has a tough game against the Blue Jays, but he’s among the most talented options for the day.

Jose Quintana faces the Braves and ace starter TBA. The Braves just haven’t announced their post-break rotation, but all of their pitchers possess similar talent. Which is a convoluted way of saying, this also isn’t a good match-up.

Edwin Jackson is a pitcher I expect to be targeting frequently in the second half. He’ll face another eligible grinder, Tyler Chatwood. However, I am avoiding the match-up because it is at Coors Field.

Randall Delgado has been quite good for the Diamondbacks aside from allowing too many home runs. This is a surprising development since he was quite terrible in Triple-A. The reason for his success is easy to spot, a 1.15 BB/9 will let a pitcher get away with a lot of mistakes. However, he’s rarely featured a walk rate below 4.00 since 2010. We’ll see how patient the Giants are with him.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

Pitcher (bum): Scott Diamond does everything right for his limited skill set, but it could take him awhile to find his inner Jamie Moyer.

Jeremy Guthrie is a sufficiently adequate pitcher most days, but he will face the Tigers on Sunday.

Monday’s grind

I wanted to write about Monday but it’s still TBA heavy. Dan Haren and Joe Blanton are both elite K/BB options who have under-performed their peripherals – Blanton’s been doing that his entire career. They face the Pirates and Twins respectively.

Kyle Gibson may be one to exploit, although Angels hitters are generally unavailable.


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Will H.
10 years ago

I like Eovaldi, but only at a HR-suppressing park. I’m actually pretty happy with Maholm instead; he’s solid, Peavy has some rust the Braves could knock off, and most of all CWS is godawful versus lefties.

(Nice grab w/ Alex Wood, btw… I’d never heard of him. Perhaps your readers would be interested.)

Brad Johnson
10 years ago

As soon as he shows up on the radar he’ll be getting a heavy buy recommendation. I’m not 100% convinced they’ll be able to go through with demoting an above average SP (Medlen), even if the club will be better off for it.

I’m also not sure where Brandon Beachy fits in since he’s back to doing Triple-A rehab starts. I think they’ll option him or bring him in as another relief option, but I just don’t know.

Danny
10 years ago

Is this pitchers only now?  Damn, I need to pick up some stolen bases this weekend.

Brad Johnson
10 years ago

I write these up every morning before work, so there’s a limited amount of time I can spend on them. In order to do 3 days of content on Fridays, I decided to drop position players.

Use the exploit pitchers to find hitters with favorable match-ups or feel free to list a couple options plus your goals and I’ll give you my opinions.