 everybody opening day, finally here on Thursday, which means MLB DFS back once again for the 2021 season. It feels like it's been so long, so we've gotten to discuss this. Tomorrow's going to be a fun day. We're going to break it all down right here. Get yourself for the main slate over on FanDuel.com and hopefully start 2021 off with a bang. Welcome on into the solo shop. That's right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network and NumberFire.com. My name is Jim Sodis. I am a senior writer and analyst for NumberFire.com. Here to break down Thursday's main MLB DFS slate. Lock is at 1.05 PM Eastern on Thursday. It is an 11 game slate and it's going to be a fun one. Now if this is your first year playing MLB DFS, I'll try to keep the terminology pretty basic here, let you know if there are numbers I'm using that you may not know about. Try to talk about that. The general format for the show, three pitchers, three stacks that I like and also three things to watch based on the salaries over at FanDuel.com. We have our solo shot, which generally accords every weekday morning, 9 AM Eastern on the FanDuel YouTube page that is posted on the NumberFire Daily Fantasy Podcast feed immediately after that. We also have a Q&A show, usually every weekday of 4 PM, talking lineups, answering your questions about lineups as they come out. Now because opening day is very different, we have lock at 1.05 PM, changing things up for opening day. We have the solo shot right now, the Q&A show for tomorrow will be at noon Eastern. So if you want to ask questions about DFS process, specific plays that I like for Thursday, make sure you are subscribed to the FanDuel YouTube page, also on Twitch and Facebook, taking questions from all those platforms, getting you set as lineups come out to get you set for Thursday's slate. The solo shot, also on YouTube live at 9 AM, you can subscribe to the NumberFire Daily Fantasy podcast feed to get that as it is posted. So solo shot 9 AM, Q&A 4 PM usually, but for this opening day slate, we'll have our Q&A at noon. So make sure you swing on by say hi to those of you who were regular viewers last year, ask some questions and get set for what should be a fun slate. 11 games, a lot of good pitching options, obviously the being opening day. So it should be a fun one, but because we have those two shows, it's important to make sure you are subscribed to the NumberFire Daily Fantasy podcast feed, but also YouTube, Facebook and Twitch to get those questions in as things go along. With opening day finally being here, that means it's time for Daily Fantasy Baseball and there is no better place to play than on Fandall. For only $4, you have a chance to compete for a part of the $500,000 prize pool with first place taking home $100,000, turning $4 into 100K, not bad. Set your lineup by Thursday at 1 PM Eastern and compete for Daily Fantasy Baseball Prizes. Head over to Fandall.com and start the season off right. For more details, visit Fandall.com or download the Fandall app today. Eligibility restrictions apply. Let's start things off here with our pitching preview for this Thursday Slade, Shane Bieber, highest salary pitcher over on Fandall. He is $11,500. Garrett Coles, $11,000. Hugh Darvish is $10,7. Tyler Glasnow is $10,000. Kenton Maeda is $9,400. Aaron Nola is $92. Kyle Hendricks, $91. And Clayton Kershaw rounds at the top group at $9,000. Now, one important note here is because we're recording on Wednesday and the Slade is on Thursday, it does mean you wanna go to numberfire.com sometime Thursday, check out the weather. The rule of thumb is you want your pitchers in colder weather and you want your hitters in warmer weather. That means the indoor stadiums are gonna be more valuable this time of year because they'll be warmer than the outdoor stadiums. So I'll be talking about weather throughout the podcast for today because it is very important, but I would make sure you circle back on Thursday, check out the temperatures again. Cold, good for pitching, cold, bad for hitting. If we're gonna make things as basic as possible. And that does play into our first pitcher here for the main slate. We got a lot of good options here for sure, which will always be the case. But the number one option will be Shane Bieber at 11.5. And he is the highest salary guy for a good reason. He's facing the Tigers. And I think this lineup will be much better than the perception this year because they've actually got some decent dudes across the board. But what I also know is they're gonna strike out. That's what we care about most for DFS. Their current active roster, which you can find over at fangraphs.com. There is an active roster button. Just toggle that. That means it'll pull in the players who are currently on their roster for 2021, what they did in 2020. Once you do that, their current active roster at a 26% strikeout versus righties last year, which is tied for second highest on the main slate versus the opposing pitcher's hand in this. They also had an 86 WRC plus. So while they will be better, they're not a team we have to avoid. WRC plus does account for park 100 as average. They were below that last year. Higher than 100 is better than average. Lower than 100 is worse than average. They were 86, so about 14% below average last year. Bieber's full season numbers last year were disgusting. He had a 41% strikeout rate, 2.52 skill interactive ERA, skill interactive ERA takes out luck, takes out defense, stuff like that. Strikeout rate matters a lot for MLB DFS. We'll go more in depth on that in things to watch for today. And we did see Bieber make a late season tweak where he was throwing fewer cutters and fewer sliders. And the strikeout rate did come down, but it was still 38.5%. That was second highest on this main slate for each pitcher's most relevant sample. That's good enough to still be very good, especially against a high strikeout team like the Tigers. When you're putting that up against a strikeout or a lineup that projects a strikeout plenty in a great park for pitching with the temperatures being in the 30s, it's really hard to say no. Another important thing for opening day is to make sure guys are fully ramped up. No workload concerns here for Bieber. He faced 24 batters in his final tune-up. He should have a full leash on Thursday. So yes, the salary is high, but I think Bieber's worth at 11.5. He is definitely one of my top three pitchers for this main slate. But I can also understand why you may not want to fork over 11.5 to get to Bieber. And I also, if I have one lineup, won't be doing so. My number one pitcher, if we're talking considering salary, considering everything for the main slate, is going to be Tyler Glassnau because the Dodgers are a course field. And if I want to stack the Dodgers, I might need more salary flexibility than Bieber can get me, but Glassnau is 10,000. Now, Glassnau's pitching environment is not as good as Bieber's because Glassnau's Miami. Miami is a pitcher's park for sure, but not this time of year because it's so cold elsewhere. It makes Miami a better environment relative to other ones. So it's either warm or it's indoors. Neither of those is ideal this time of year, but everything else is really good for Tyler Glassnau. I mentioned earlier in this podcast that Bieber has the second highest strikeout rate on the slate in each pitcher's most relevant sample. The only guy ahead of him is Glassnau at 39%. Glassnau did that over his final seven starts where he worked in his curve ball more. And the reason that that is the most relevant sample for Glassnau is because he might be adding another off-speed pitch this year. He's been working on adding a slider in spring training. That would give him two off-speed pitches. And Glassnau was one of the few guys who could be great with basically just being a two-pitch pitcher. Now, it's possible he has three. Even in that sample where he had just two pitches, he had a 2.77 skill interactive ERA, which is an elite number with a lot of strikeouts. And he was also with that slider this spring. He threw 14 and 2 thirds innings and struck out 27 batters. That's disgusting. He should be pretty close to a full leash to 79 pitches for him on March 27th. So if we get the 2020 version of Glassnau, we'll be very happy. But there's the potential for him to be even better than that if that slider winds up being as good as it possibly could be and as good as it looked so far this spring. $10,000 salary gives you more flexibility to get to the Dodgers. And the ceiling is still very high with Glassnau. The one consolation, again, is that it's not as good of an environment for pitching as what Bieber has because the temperature is higher. But I think that even accounting for that, I think that Glassnau's on par with Bieber. He's a salary discount too. So I think that if I have just one lineup for Thursday, I'm probably using Tyler Glassnau as my pitcher for that lineup. Now, usually the way things work in the solo shot is I have two high salary pitchers, one lower salary. And the cutoff for that for me is $9,000 or lower. Usually I will be pretty close to that because pitching, you kind of have to pay if you want to get good stuff there over on a fan. I think that Jack Flaherty is super under salary at $8,600. And I'll talk about him and things to watch. But there is another guy I like here who is $6,700. And guys like that don't come along very often. And that guy is John Means at $6,700 for the Orioles. He's facing the Red Sox and Fenway. 52 degrees in Fenway on Thursday, so not as good as Bieber's weather, but also pretty decent for pitching. It's also not the worst matchup because the Red Sox, based on their current active roster, a 95 WRC plus against Lafty's last year, that's fine. But this is more about Means himself than his situation or his matchup because we saw Means get a lot of buzz last year because his velocity was up from previous years and that was fine, like he didn't do great to start. But I think the key thing for Means is what he did over his final four starts. He used his curveball more often and it paid massive dividends. Means is one of those guys who could get to two strikes, couldn't get that third strike. The curveball wound up being that third strike pitch for him at the end of last year. Over his final four starts, Means had a 2.74 skill interactive ERA. His strikeout rate was 35% near a 3% walk rate. He also allowed just a 4% barrel rate. So those are fantastic numbers across the board. Now it is a small sample. That's something to note here for sure. But those are all numbers that stabilize pretty quickly. Especially strikeout rate, that number can stabilize very quickly. He had good swinging strike numbers and Means was electric. He didn't really light it up during the spring. He had just 14 strikeouts and 19 innings, but I think there's potential here with Means and when you use him, you can kinda go nuts with whatever hitters you wanna use. You want Fernanda Thatis, you want the Dodgers. You can do that if you plug in John Means. And it might be the only time this year we get to use guys who are this low-salary, who have at least a path to getting you strikeouts. So I'm fine buying in, getting speculative shares of John Means at this point in the year and seeing what happens. Again, I will go through Flaherty later on because if you don't like Means, I don't blame you. I get it, totally understandable. You can still get some value elsewhere via Flaherty, but I'm at least interested in giving Means a check, see what happens. If it doesn't go well, fine. It's one slate, it's not gonna burn me too much, but if I can get in on a pitcher with strikeout upside for $6,700, I'm inclined. So I think that John Means, a worthy value play for a Thursday slate. Again, you got a lot of options. You can talk about Garrett Cole. We can talk about you, Darvish. A lot of guys we can go through here for sure, but I think that if for me, Glass now number one, if I have one lineup, Bieber number two straight up means the guy I want to consider, we'll talk about Jack Flaherty later on as well. Let's take a look at the stacks for this slate. And if you are new to MLB DFS, the reason we do it this way, pitchers and then stacks is that I don't care as much about one-off hitters. I want, if I can, every batter in my line to be tied to a teammate. And I want them to have, you know, I want to stack teams. I don't want to just use one-offs because if Jorge Ocelero hits a three-run bomb and I've got Whit Merrifield and Salvador Perez in my team, I get to double dip. So you want to stack as much as possible. If you can go two four-player stacks, sweet, try to do so. So that's why the focus for the podcast will be on stacks. And for stacking, the discussion on Thursday starts and ends with the Dodgers at Coors Field. It's not just because they're at Coors Field, which if, again, if you're new, it's basically like playing on the moon where you're going to score a lot of runs. Advantages for DFS, they do increase the salaries of hitters who are there, but it's generally not enough. And it's not just Coors Field. It's also because it's war, Coors Field. The temperature is projected to be 66 degrees in Denver on Thursday. That is the fourth highest temperature on the main slate. So once you put that at Coors Field, this is far and away the best environment for hitting we've got on this slate. The Dodgers are facing Adema Marquez, and I think he's a good pitcher. I like him quite a bit. I had a lot of Marquez a couple of years ago in season long, but this is a really rough spot for him. He bounced back pretty well last year, 3.75 ERA for the full season. That's good. He did that by leaning more on his sinker and limiting hard contact. Kind of just fully went in on being a guy who keeps the ball on the ground. And we especially saw Marquez lean on that over his final five starts. And that time he allowed just a 2% barrel rate league average about 7%. He was awesome. But he also had just a 19% strikeout rate with a 7% walk rate. And what that means is that he was allowing a lot of balls of play. That's what you want for DFS. A lot of balls of play, low strikeout rates, that's how you get your batter's chance to hit home runs. That's a recipe for danger at Coors Field, specifically against a team that no matter how skilled you may be at limiting hard contact, the Dodgers, they're gonna hit the ball pretty well. The Dodgers against righties last year based on their current active roster, a 132 WRC plus against righties, a 43% hard hit rate, just a 20% strikeout rate. So they will put the ball in play and it'll likely be well-struck. And with this game being at Coors Field, that's really tough for me to turn down. So to me, the Dodgers are a no-brainer at the top of this list. And you can get to them if you have Glassnow. You can get there with Flaherty, you can get there with Means for sure. And I think that you can at least give it a shot with Bieber as long as your second stack is lower. Sorry, you pepper in some value plays. I would at least try to make it work with a couple of Dodgers and with Shane Bieber. But overall, if you're going to Glassnow, you can make it work pretty easily, which is reassuring for sure. And what helps is that there are a lot of mid-range plays with this Dodgers team, which is why I'm not giving up on using them with Bieber. Justin Turner is $3,500. Will Smith is 35. In the past, he has not caught Clayton Kershaw, but we may see that change this year, especially in opening day. Hoping Smith plays for $3,500 because last year, both Turner and Smith had a hard hit rate and a fly ball rate of at least 40% against righties. If they do play, especially Smith, they should hit a however spot in the order. So there are two guys you can use regardless of what you do at pitcher. A.J. Pollock, likely to bat 7th, 35% hard hit rate for him against righties last year, a 40% fly ball rate. Gavin Lux is $3,000, probably going to bat eighth, which means he's in front of the pitcher. Not ideal, but of course I can take that for sure. So you can lean on those guys when you go Bieber. And if you decide to go at Glassnow, you can get to Corey Seeger, Cody Bellinger, Max Muncie, not all of them obviously, but you can get some of them for sure. So start with the Dodgers and go from there, from a stacking perspective on this slate. The second stack is not a value one. So if you're going Bieber and you go Dodgers, you can't use the second team as your second stack, but they're also very worthy. That's the Padres against Madison Bumgarner. Now Bumgarner looked very good this spring, but I'm still a bit skeptical of what he's going to look like here in the regular season. He had 16 strikeouts and 11 and a third innings, and that's great. And I do value strikeouts in the spring. Again, you want to look for numbers to stabilize quickly. Strikeout rate does, and Bumgarner got strikeouts in the spring, but it was also just 11 and a one-third innings. His velocity is up from where it was last year, and it's in line with what it was over his final two starts. When you read about Madison Bumgarner this all season, they were saying, we want to get him back where he was for those two starts because he was good in those two starts. He allowed no runs across 10 innings, and that's the positive. The negative is that his swinging strike rate was still very low in those starts. It was 7.5%. The rule of thumb is you take swinging strike rate, and you multiply it by two, that roughly gets you the projected strikeout rate for a pitcher. That'd be 15% for Bumgarner, and one of those starts is against the Rockies, and they're a pretty bad offense. So I'm not convinced that if Bumgarner gets back to what he was in those final two starts, that he'll be someone we should avoid. So I think that we're gonna get a good read on Bumgarner for sure on Thursday, given the team he's facing, given that it's a regular season game, but I'm not quite convinced yet that Bumgarner is back to being the 2018, 2019 Bumgarner. I think it's something we can stack against. Even in those years, he's still allowed a lot of hard contact. Such as me, I'm pretty comfortable sacking against him with this Padre's offense. Fernando Patius Jr., $4,300. I think he's pretty heavily under salad. I think that Corey Segar at 45 obviously makes a ton of sense too at Coors Field, but Tati's $4,300, that makes a lot of sense. I wanna get there for sure. There are other options here too. Tommy Pham has had a 46% hard hit rate against the lefties since the start of 2019. He has as many walks of strikeouts. You do worry about Pham during day games because of his eyes, but I still think that I would like to get there because he's $3,000. Will Myers is 29. He has a 50% hard hit rate since the start of 2019 against the lefties. I could tolerate Jurickson Profar at $2,300 if he were to hit higher than ninth or higher than eighth, I should say. You know, it's a value play. It's not gonna be great, but you do have options down here. So I think it's realistic to get to guys like Tati's and Machado here for sure, especially if you plug into Pham and Myers first and go from there. Also, I did fill out a lineup with Glassnow and I was able to stack the Dodgers and the Padres. So you can make this work. It does mean you'll have to make some consolations and use some players you might not want to use otherwise, but I think that given the upside in those two offenses specifically, I'm gonna try to do so for Thursday's sleight. Now, if you're looking for some good value plays, you're gonna have to make again some consolations and a rough park, maybe one of those consolations. The good thing is that this park is not as bad this time of year as other parks are when they're super cold. So I'm okay actually stacking the raise here against the Marlins. They're facing Sandy Alcantra and he was really solid last year. He had a sub four ERA for the third consecutive year. Two of those were in smaller samples, but Alcantra was still very good. He's not a big strikeout guy though and that's the raise major weakness. I don't wanna stack the raise ever against the high strikeout pitcher because they strike out a lot. We also see Alcantra lose a lot of his batted ball suppression when he's facing lefties and the raise have a lot of lefties. The ground ball rate versus lefties since the start of 2019 for Alcantra is 28%. It is 66% against righties. So if you put him up against a super lefty heavy lineup with guys who can crush when they make contact, you're gonna get some damage here. Now Alcantra's working a lot on a change up this spring, trying to counter lefties, but kinda wanna see it before I avoid lefties who are facing. It's not the best matchup on the board, but I think that it's the best one in an acceptable weather situation with a team that can actually hit a bit. So I will be in on the raise here, especially the left-handed batters. That's not to say I'm not gonna use Randy Rosarena, but I'm gonna skew toward the lefties when picking through this line. And we have some good value at spots in the order here. I specifically love Yoshi Tsutsugo. He's $2,600, seems likely to bat lead off for this team. He had a really bad batting average last year. It was actually below the Mendoza line, but hit for some power. He had a 9.3% barrel rate, that's above average. And that was largely because he just put the ball in the air a time, a 47% fly ball rate against righties. And that's great. So I think that Tsutsugo, one of the better value plays in the slate, I can get behind Austin Meadows in a bounce back here. COVID seemed to really affect him last year. Brandon Lauze, a good mid-range play. Not a big Joey Wendell guy in general, but he had a little bit of pop and spring training. It was against weak competition, but he's $2,500, I guess I can go there at a time. So we had to make consolations if we wanted to jam in the Dodgers and the Padres. If that means he's in Joey Wendell, I'll do it this one time a year. I might not do it anytime again this year, kind of similar to John Means, but I think desperate times call for desperate measures. So we might be using Joey Wendell in a couple of lineups on Thursday Slate. Avoid it if you can, but if you can't, he's at least an option just because I think this Raze team should be able to do some damage against Alcantra. Let's finish up here with things to watch for this Thursday Slate. And if you're a new listener and a new DFS player, I want to explain why I'm not in on Kyle Hendricks for Thursday because he has the optimal situation. He is at home, he's facing the pirates, and it's in super cool temperatures. So if you told me right now on Wednesday that Kyle Hendricks throws a no-hitter on Thursday, I'm not gonna flinch, but he's not someone who posts big DFS totals because in seven starts last year where Hendricks was throwing his curve ball more often, he had a 21% strikeout rate. Let's say that Hendricks goes out and throws nine shutout innings with five strikeouts. That's 52 fan dual points if you're adding the win and the quality start. A player gets 52 fan dual points, they go six innings, but get eight strikeouts. That's how valuable strikeouts are on fan dual. They matter a ton. And Hendricks doesn't generally get a lot of strikeouts. So he's one of those guys where his real world value does not translate as well to DFS as you would hope. So again, Hendricks could throw a no-hitter, but we want higher upside for DFS. We get upside via strikeouts. So I respect Hendricks. I think he's a very good pitcher. He's not someone I tend to use a lot in DFS because I want guys who get a lot of strikeouts. Hendricks not that guy. So it's a great matchup, great situation. I'm gonna prioritize guys like Bieber, Laznow, Flaherty and Means over him. So let's talk about Jack Flaherty here. I do like him a lot. I think a big reason for liking Flaherty is that he's just under salaried and it makes sense. It's opening day, not everybody can be $10,000, but Flaherty's $8,600, which is just too low for his talents. But Flaherty had a weird year last year. He, the whole team had that long stretch off because of COVID-19. But when Flaherty got on later in the year, he did hit a groove. And over his final five starts, he was throwing more foreseamers, fewer sinkers, and he had a 33% strikeout rate. He also had a 12% walk rate. That's higher than he want. And walks have been an issue for him before. The Reds are a team who will draw walks. So that's why Flaherty is not going to grade out as well for me as Glasgow. But the Reds will strike out 25% strikeout rate for them last year against Reds. Flaherty, again, a 33% strikeout rate in that sample. That's enough for me to be in on him for tournaments. Again, I'm going to rank him below Glasgow, below Bieber, right on par with Means for me. But I think that he's still worth exposure because if you told me Jack Flaherty is the highest scoring pitcher on the slate, again, not going to flinch. I think that's very much within the range of outcomes. And if you can get that for $8,600, you should take it for sure. Finally here, outside of the Dodgers, the Padres and the Reyes, other spots you could turn to for potential stacks or one offs, the Cubs have the best matchup on the slates. They're facing Chad Cool. The reason that I didn't want the Cubs and stacks is that their weather is kind of a nightmare. It looks like the wind might be blowing in and they have super cold temperatures. So they're an option, but that forecast really does negatively impact their outlook from a heading perspective. I'm also okay with some exposure to the Rangers and the Royals. The Rangers tough to stack because their offense is so, so bad. Nick Solak, he works at $2,700. Joey Gallows 35, I can get on board with them because they're individually good. Just the offense is terrible. The Royals are facing Kyle Gibson, not gonna get a lot of strikeouts. I don't think their offense is too bad this year. I'm skeptical of Andrew Benintendi because I can write off 2020, but you didn't show a lot of power during the spring. So skeptical of Benintendi, but I'm on board with Carlos Santana as a being guy, I think $2,700, Jorge Solera $3,000. Those guys have some power. So I can get on board with them and get on board with someone else in the Royals. But I think from a full team stack perspective, it's a Dodgers one, Padres two, Reyes three, and then the Cubs, Royals, Rangers, all teams where I can go, but not as inclined to go as I would be with the others. Again, if you have questions about Tomorrow's Slate, feel free to tune in at noon Eastern on the Fandale YouTube, Twitch and Facebook pages. Answer your questions live on air. We'll have probably most lineups in by then. So you can, if you have questions about individual value plays or other pitches I did not discuss, come back then at noon Eastern. We'll get you set for Thursday's Slate. That is all that we have for the solo shop for today's solo shop. Back with you 9 a.m. Eastern on the Fandale YouTube page, also up on the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. Immediately after that, make sure you're subscribed to the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed to get that right as it is posted. Outside of the Q&A, if you have questions for me, I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis, J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S. You can also follow the Fandale Podcast Network at Fandale Podcast. Big thank you to Calvin Theobald, our video producer for running the video side of things here today. Thank you, Cal, as always. And thank you to everyone for tuning in. We finally made it, opening day here once again. It's going to be a fun one. Just watch the baseball and hopefully winning some money as well. We'll talk to you once again tomorrow. This has been the solo shop right here on the Fandale Podcast Network.