 I made a big mistake yesterday because I complained about the starting pitching options available to us in MLB DFS, which basically ensured that today's slate would be even worse. And it is because you look at today's slate and if I just run through my top strikeout projections for today, the top strikeout projections belong to a guy at Coors Field. They belong to a guy facing the Blue Jays on the road and they belong to a guy at home, but facing the Astros. That's pretty grim because I want to maximize strikeouts. I want to maximize ceiling in order to do so for today. I'm going to have to either take a swing on a couple of guys who don't project all that well or go into really risky situations and kind of cross my fingers and hope for the best. I'm probably going to want to go in that way more often than not, but I don't know if that's the right approach. So it's a very difficult slate for today. Let's dive on it and break it down and hopefully start things off on a good foot for today. Welcome on into the solo shop. That's right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network and NumberFire.com. My name is Jim Sonnis. I am a senior writer and analyst for NumberFire.com. Here to break down Tuesday's eight game main slate with lock set for 7 0 5 p.m. Eastern for today. And if you're looking at this slate and just looking at MLB.com, you'll notice that some of the games starting later on are not on the slate. It is because they are the second games of double headers. So we don't have to worry about those double headers for our purposes for DFS for today because they're not on the FanDuel slate. Personally I am very in favor of this because it means I don't have to worry about if a guy is going to be in there post lock stuff like that. So I think it's positive personally. I'm on board that it's still an eight game slate. So this is my strong preference and I'm happy things are that way. Only one weather note for today. That is a coarse field for the Rockies and Giants. Winds are in from center at 11 miles per hour. That's a slight downgrade to hitters there. But I wouldn't go too far with it. Maybe it helps our guy Alex Cobb who we'll talk about later on, but we shall see more on that later on. Before we get into the pitching preview for today though, got to let you know that the PGA is back in a big way this weekend with a massive daily fantasy contest on FanDuel. This PGA mega eagle contest includes $400,000 in total prizes with first place netting $100,000. Best of all, it's only $9 to enter. To get yourself a chance at all that cash, go to FanDuel.com or download the FanDuel app. Eligibility restrictions apply. And if you were looking for a breakdown of that PGA DFS slate, Brandon Gadoula and I broke it down yesterday on the heat check when in depth on which studs we're building around, some pivots or tournaments, a value play we both adore, roster construction and a whole lot more. Just search for the number fired daily fantasy podcast feed. Wherever you get your podcast, hit subscribe. You can also find it up on the FanDuel YouTube page as well. Pitching preview for this Tuesday main slate. Here we go. Logan Gilbert is the highest salary guy in FanDuel. He checks in at $10,100. Nathaniel Valdi is $9,500. James Intayo, $92. Adrian Houser, $9,000. And then we have Chad Cool and Reed Detmers fresh off his no hitter, checking in as the other guys at $8,000 or higher. It ain't great. I'll tell you that for sure. I was like looking at this slate yesterday before the Mets post and I was like, okay, I guess, you know, Steven Matz revenge game, maybe I'll go there, but now I don't have him either. So it's tough and I never want to target a guy facing the Astros because not only are they good, but they're not a big strikeout team. But given what's available, I do think that Nathaniel Valdi is going to be my favorite option for today. And it is a tough spot. The Astros have a 124 WRC plus against Reides. Very good. They're the best ISO on the Slates. Also very good. And the second best strikeout rate on the slate. Very bad. It's a true nightmare of a matchup, but I just don't have that many good alternatives here. He is at least really talented. He's made seven starts this year. He has a 3.03 skill interactive ERA with a 26% strikeout rate and a 4% walk rate. Evaldi does let up too much hard contact, which is why I can't be even more enthusiastic about this. The hard contact does stick in my mind, but he's worked around it to get good results on top of those good peripherals this year. His ERA is 3.15 and that's with some pretty tough matchups in there. He's faced the Blue Jays twice. He's faced the Yankees and the Braves. So it's not comfortable to target a guy in this tough of a matchup, but Evaldi at least has the juice to get the job done. I can live with that when I have legitimately no good alternatives on this slate, so Evaldi to me is the top guy available for today. Might not feel great, but I do think it is the best way to go in this spot. Number two will be Alex Cobb at Coorsfield. He's coming off an injury, facing the Rockies for the second straight start. It checks pretty much every red flag you could possibly concoct, but I still think we want him in our player pool, but let's address the downsides here first. I'm not sure what the pitch count will look like here for Cobb because he did go 85 last time out. He was still building up off his injury, but we can't automatically assume that pitch count will go up. As mentioned, he didn't face the Rockies and it's at Coorsfield. So that's all very rough, but I can see a path to a good game here for Cobb. He's been awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome in his five starts this year, the 2.52 skill interactive ERA, a 32% strikeout rate is bad of all data, has been awesome as well. It's easy to buy into this shift for Cobb too because his velocity spiked. Maybe that led to the injury, but like that's a good thing. If he's out there, we can feel better about those good peripherals sticking. We just haven't gotten to see a whole lot of it due to the injury, but Cobb had 10 strikeouts in one game, he had eight in another, so the upside is there. The floor is not. Very much is not. I just personally for DFS don't tend to care too much about floor. If it breaks, it breaks. Min cashing doesn't do all that much for you. I'd rather shoot for first place and if I fail, that's fine, we're on to the next slate. I think that Cobb gives me the best access to first relative to a lot of other guys on this slate. I'll use him here, despite the massive and obvious downsides of Cobb. It is a rough spot. I don't want to go here very often, but very low salary. He has the upside. There is upside for more pitches than I've got him projected for, so Cobb against the Rocky Secours, what could go wrong? We'll see how it goes for tonight. In the third slot, I'm going to put Jameson Tyone, and this is not based on strikeout projections. It's based on potential and his situation, and that could be enough on a bad slate like this. The situation for Tyone is that he's facing the Orioles. Like we said last night, when they were facing Luis Severino, they're not a bad roster, but they're also not one we need to fear right now in terms of DFS. Tyone broadly is doing some things very well. He's letting up minimal hard contact. He's not walking anybody. The problem is strikeouts. The strikeout rate for Tyone is 19% across six starts. That's pretty underwhelming, and if I were to make the assumption that he would stay there, I might not get here, even in a good situation on a bad slate. But I do think there is a shot that that number, that strikeout rate does go up. The big thing is that three of his six starts this year have been against the Blue Jays, and two of his lowest strikeout games from a strikeout rate perspective have come against them as well. It's been a tough spot for him for sure, and I don't expect guys to feast when they're facing the Jays as much as he has. The second thing, and this is to me the biggest thing, is that Tyone is upping his cutter usage recently. He didn't throw it at all in his first two starts, but he threw it 25% of the time the past two starts, more cutters, fewer forcing fastballs. That's a very good thing for him because it's a good pitch. The Xwoba against that pitch is 203 according to Baseball Savant. It's also taken away from the Four Seamer, which has an Xwoba of 360 against it. So he's taken away from a bad pitch, adding it to a very good pitch. And I think it's very simple to view that as being a pretty big upgrade for Tyone. He did make one start against the Orioles with the cutter more in the fold as around 13%, I think, in that game. He was fine. It wasn't a great start for him. But I think if we expand the sample, give him a longer run here, this will wind up being a positive long-term for Tyone to make this shift towards the cutter. So honestly, that's bad for pitching. I am okay with Tyone at $9,200. I'd rank him above Logan Gilbert against the Blue Jays, but I will put him behind Evaldi and Cobb. So Evaldi and Cobb, the two guys are great at really well. My strikeout projections, Tyone isn't. But I think that there is wiggle room for me to be wrong there. So I will rank him in the top three at Pitcher for today. Now at Pitcher being kind of rough, it does kind of imply that stacks are better. And I do think that is the case. Let's go there now and talk about the Giants once again at Coors Field. They're not in as good of a spot tonight as the one they had last night. And I just don't like the matchup as much, but I still think that they are a team to build around once again. We're facing Chad Cool. Cool is a better pitcher than Antonio Sanzatella and then the middle relievers who came in after Sanzatella last night. Cool is pitching pretty well overall this year. He didn't throw his slider a lot in his first two starts, but he isn't using it a lot in his past four. And in those four starts, Cool does have a 3.75 skill interactive ERA. His fly ball rate is 32%. Those are very acceptable numbers. It does include a matchup with the Giants. He had eight strikeouts in that game. So really good outing by Cool against this very good team. There are two issues though. The first one is that that means they just saw him. It was his most recent start. The second one was that even with those eight strikeouts, the Giants still tagged him for five earned runs. So even with Cool improving, he's not untouchable and now you're moving that to Coors Field. It's an even tougher assignment. And the Giants also have a lot of lefties out there. So it makes sense that they would be the team that would give Cool some issues. He's had some pretty extreme platoon splits in the past and also recently. So I do want to acknowledge that Cool has pitched well, but it's a pretty tough spot here. And I'm willing to stack against him with the Giants for tonight. And as always with the Giants, we saw this again last night. We do have to be mindful of pinch hitters with the lefties. I went into last night feeling pretty good about Lamont Wade because he had finished five of his previous six starts. And then since the tail leaves and Wade's gone by like the fourth or fifth inning, only gets two played appearances. So I do still feel better about Wade than they do about like Jack Peterson and guys like that. But I think that again, it's just so important to emphasize with the Giants to be mindful of the fact that these guys could leave for pinch hitters. What that does for me is, A, I diversify more within my stacks. So not building around the same four guys within each stack every time. And B, I try to prioritize guys who I think will play the entire game, Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt. Wilmer Flores, if he starts, is in that discussion as well. If there is a guy you think will stay in there, even if the Rockies bring out a leftie out of the bullpen, feel better about them. So I think that's our matter for tonight is just you can still use the left-handed Giants for sure, but just be wary of it. Adjust for it within the way you build your stacks and stuff like that. It's a very real thing. And it's something we always have to keep in mind whenever we want to stack them. As far as the second stack goes, I had been waiting this year for Spencer Watkins to have some regression towards his peripherals. I've been stacking against him, wasn't working out all that well, but it did happen last time out. Watkins led up seven earned runs to the Cardinals. And I think that makes it easier to stack the Yankees against him today. And again, Watkins is a different guy this year, is getting more ground balls, which helps him, hurts his stacking appeal. But everything else about his profile outside of the fly ball rate is very stackable. He has almost as many walks of strikeouts, the hard hit rate is 43%. So they may not always be in the air, but they are coming off the bat pretty hot. And that's why the expected ERA for Watkins is 6.74, despite the ground balls. The ERA for Watkins, the actual ERA is 5.19 after the poor start last week. And that was against the Cardinals. The Cardinals are fine, but they're not a great offense against righties. Whereas the Yankees are, they got a 122 WRC+, on their current active roster. They walk a lot. They're probably gonna put Watkins in some really tough spots tonight. So we do have to keep in mind that this is more of a neutral park now. Camden Yards than it used to be with the walls pushed back. So it's not a park factor spot, but the temperature is up at 74 degrees today. That's actually the highest of any outdoor game. And it makes the Yankees a quality stack against Watkins. And I think that we can feel good about them in this situation and ride with the Yankees as our second stack behind the Giants here for today. But then the Yankee stacks, it kind of looks like Joey Gallo is starting to get his power back. I used him a bit last night, he went 0 for 5. So good job, Jim. But Gallo did home or twice over the weekends. His barrel rate is 26% from April 24th on the strikeouts. Haven't shot up too much in this time. So I'm going to start to buy back into him, try to do that recently. I would still rank Judge, Stanton and Rizzo a good amount above him. But Gallo, especially as a value player at $2,600. Like if it's within your Yankee stacks or is like a one-off, I would feel pretty okay about that. So Gallo, to me, back on the menu, given that we're starting to see a bit of a return to the bad-a-ball stuff from where he was earlier on this year. Now, if you want a bit of a different stack for your third stack, at least one I think will be different, I would check out the Boston Red Sox. They're facing Jose Rikidi and Rikidi has really struggled to open the year. He has just a 16% strikeout rate. His swinging strike rate is 8.8%. So that low mark, the low strikeout rate seems pretty legit. That's an issue always, a low strikeout rate. But it's a bigger issue when you're struggling with hard contact. And Rikidi is. He's allowed a 49% hard hit rate with a 48% fly ball rate. It's led to an expected ERA of 6.29. His ERA is 4.40, so not great, but it hasn't killed him yet. But he has had a couple blow-up outings. And both those came on the road, which is where he is at for tonight. Rikidi has been a good pitcher in the relatively recent past, which means he very well could buck this and get better. And I almost expect that to happen, because I have some faith in Rikidi for sure. But for now, it's not happening. I think that it'd be weird to just ignore this and not stack the Red Sox. So I will stack the Red Sox here and see if the hard contact for Rikidi does wind up sticking. I want to mention that it's not like a contrarian type thing to be on the Red Sox, given that their implied total is quite high. But I do still think that despite that, they're a team I feel pretty good about for today. We'll see a lot of attention, of course, feel a lot of attention on the Yankees. They might not be as popular as they should be, and especially because Rikidi does have some name value as a pitcher. So maybe under rostered relative to where they should be. I think it's worth talking about Alex Verdugo for a second. He has struggled overall this year, but starting to loft the ball a bit more, which honestly, given the way the balls have been flying, could be part of why he's struggling. But his fly ball rate is 35%. That is up 5 percentage points from where it was last year that could eventually lead to more power now that it's getting warmer outside. So I'm fine going to Verdugo as a value play, $2,800. Obviously, the Red Sox has some really good guys we want to go to here. But Verdugo, the primary, I would say, value play against Rikidis. As far as guys, I do feel good about. I think that we kind of view him as more of like a singles type hitter, but there is a bit more loft in this profile we may otherwise think. Let's go to things to watch. And if you look at the pitching options today, you'll see Jose Barrios is at a very low salary, $7,200. I just can't talk myself into it. His swing and strike rate is 8.5%. He has a 15% strikeout rate. The batted ball numbers for Barrios this year have actually gotten a lot worse, like a lot worse. So I can see the case for it just because we know somewhere in there there is a good pitcher. But I think I'd rather stack against him than using as my pitcher for today just because the issues are really pronounced and it's concerning. So I love Barrios. I grew up a Twins fan, so like I root for him, but not there right now based on the numbers I'm seeing. I'm curious what Tucker Davidson will look like for tonight. He's getting called back up from AAA for the Braves. And in AAA, the cross-four starts a 31% strikeout rate. He also had a big strikeout rate in AAA last year. And if you look at the one relief outing he made in the majors this year, it was a relief granted, but his velocity was sick, like way up from where it was last year. So I'm going to keep an eye on Davidson. He is stretched out. He went 90 in one of his AAA outings. I think 98 actually. But I'm not going to be there tonight for pitching, but I want to see what he does because if he sticks in the rotation and we come back around in a better match-up maybe, I could see myself jumping on board because there are some least key components that we do like in his profile. Finally, it's a terrible park, but I'm okay with some twin stacks tonight. The face of James Caprellian who had, he's had a rough start to the year, both in AAA and the majors, specifically the plate discipline numbers against Caprellian really, really bad. And the park does downgrade the twins a lot where they're outside my top three for stacking, but they are firmly a legitimate option is what I would say with them. They're fine, but I prefer other teams to mentioned in the Yankees, the Giants, and then the Red Sox over the Twins for today. Let's finish up with our Dinger calls. I do want to lean on what we talked about at the end in the third stack there with the amount of hard contact that Rikidi is allowing because Shad Kool at Coors Field is getting some ground balls, same thing for Spencer Walken. So I think we're just looking pure, like pure and Dinger hunting. I kind of like JD Martinez as being a good home run call for tonight, facing Rikidi, I think it's not that bad. Martinez had a good year from a bad ball perspective. So I'm okay going there. And I think that he's a decently fun option for today. So JD Martinez, the first one for me. The more fun one, I guess it depends on how you define fun. I define fun based on like, oh, I wouldn't have thought to make that guy like a home run pick specific against the red. He might not play, but when we're Flores is regarded as being like this lefty basher, he actually has some juice against Rikidi. He's got a 37% fly ball rate this year. Got some hard contact at 146 ISO, despite being in a bad park. Now, lastly, he did not start against Rikidi. So keep in mind, he might not play. That seems to be the curse of the phone home run pick here on the show. But if he does play Flores, we know we'll stick in for the entire game if he does start. So I'm on board with it. So the home run calls for today are Wilmer Flores and JD Martinez. That is all that we have here for today on this Tuesday slate again. I think it's pretty dicey a picture. So like let's say you're looking at the slate, you've got a strong feeling about some guy, you've got a fully way to use them because there's no right or wrong answer on tonight's slate. Do the research, decide what you'd like, go from there. I think it's a good night to trust your gut. My gut says Evaldi, it says Cobb, it says Tyome. Yours may say different, that's totally okay. I think it is a slate where there are a lot of options on the table. Do not forget we have our PGA DFS podcast already posted for the PGA championship. Define that, search for the Number Fire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. Wherever you get your podcasts, we got PGA, MLB, USC, NASCAR podcasts, all the same place. So go there, hit subscribe. If you like what you hear, leave us a rating and review as well. If you've got questions for me, I am on Twitter at Jim Sonnis, J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S. You can also follow the FanDuel Podcast Network at FanDuel Podcast. Big thank you to everyone for tuning in for today. Good luck to you with your MLB DFS lineups. We'll talk to you once again on Wednesday for another slate of MLB DFS. This has been the solo shot right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network.