Fantasy Baseball: Wednesday’s DFS advice – CBSSports.com

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Someone asked me Tuesday night if continuing to stack the
Toronto Blue Jays
was a form of the gambler’s fallacy.

That fallacy states basically that because something has happened more frequently in the past it will happen less frequently in the future. It’s a problem a lot of people have with regression as well, and it’s worthy of discussion.

If
Mike Trout
is a .300 hitter and he hits .200 for a month, the gambler’s fallacy might expect him to hit .400 the next month. That’s bad logic. The more likely outcome is that the .300 hitter hits around .300, regardless of what he did last month. If that happened, his overall average would regress back toward what we expected, but it would still be lower than expected because of the one bad month.

As it applies to the Blue Jays, they were not more likely to break out Tuesday night (or Wednesday) because they had been awful lately. They were more likely to break out because they were facing
Martin Perez
(oops). On Wednesday, they get
Colby Lewis
and the odds of them scoring a lot of runs are still very high.

Of course, the opposite of the gambler’s fallacy is the hot-hand approach. That approach would state that the Jays are less likely to do well Wednesday because they are struggling (or maybe even because Lewis is off to a decent start). I do not agree with this. It’s obvious that players have hot and cold streaks, but I reject the notion that we can use either predictably with consistent results.

I will reference hot streaks in the article as I do below with Trout, but I will play struggling players more often. The reason for this is because their price generally falls and they become better values, but not because they’re “due.”

Starting Pitchers

Early

Felix Hernandez
($11,500, $10,700)

Despite some command issues, Hernandez has been back to his dominant ways at the start of 2016. The biggest issue for the
Seattle Mariners
ace is and always has been run support. I like
Sean Manaea
, but I don’t think the Mariners will have trouble scratching out a couple of runs. That should be enough for King Felix in a huge ballpark against a mediocre offense. The Mariners’ lineup collectively has a .591 OPS vs. Hernandez in 288 plate appearances.

Tyler Chatwood
($7,400, $8,300)

If you want to go cheap at SP on the early slate, the contrarian play would be to use Manaea against the Mariners. It could pay off too. For my money, I’d rather play Chatwood against the anemic
San Diego Padres
attack. The 26 year-old righty has only allowed one run in 19.2 innings away from Coors this season. Those starts have come against the
Chicago Cubs
and
Arizona Diamondbacks
(twice). San Diego is a considerably better matchup than either.

Late

Drew Smyly
($8,700, $10,900)

I’m not in love with the way
Jose Fernandez
is pitching, and this
Los Angeles Dodgers
offense should be a great matchup for LHP. The Dodgers sat several of their lefties yesterday, and I’d be kind of surprised if they rested them all again today. Either way, you’re either getting a lineup full of LHH or AAAA bats. Since a rocky season debut, Smyly has allowed just 5 earned runs in his past 28 innings. His 10.6 K/9 are elite if he can come anywhere close to maintaining.

Stack Attack