Pitchers Took Over Saturday and We Were Ready

Fifteen games on a Saturday in August. That's a lot of baseball, a lot of noise, and — if the model is doing its job — a few clear signals hiding inside it. Saturday delivered both sides of that coin. The totals held up. The run environments cooperated. We went 2-0 on the totals side of the card, no moneyline plays graded, and the DFS slate was one of those days where the arms were magnificent and a couple of our hitters absolutely humbled us. More on that shortly.

The short version: pitching dominated Saturday in ways that were predictable in some spots and genuinely surprising in others. The over-under market felt it. We felt it too — in the right direction, mostly.

No moneyline plays published Saturday. Nothing cleared our bar on the sides, and we're not going to dress that up as strategy — the market was tight and we sat. What we did publish were two totals, and both of them hit.

• MIA @ NYM — Under 9. Final: MIA 6, NYM 2. Eight total runs. Clean, comfortable, exactly the kind of quiet game the number suggested was possible. WIN.
• NYY @ CHC — Over 6.5. Final: NYY 2, CHC 5. Seven total runs. You'll notice that's not a fireworks show — it's one run over the number, which is all you need. A win is a win. WIN.

Totals record on the day: 2-0. That's a good Saturday. We'll take it honestly and move on without spiking the football.

The DFS slate scored 442 players, and we had projections matched to 184 of them. Here's how the day shook out, player by player.

Top Scorers

• Hunter Goodman, Colorado Rockies — 40.0 DK points. The line: 4-for-5, 2 HR, 5 RBI. Our projection: 10.91. That's not a miss, that's a different zip code. Goodman was the best hitter on the slate by a comfortable margin and we did not see it coming at that level. More on this below.
• Cristopher Sanchez, Philadelphia Phillies — 35.3 DK points. The line: 6.0 IP, 11 strikeouts, 0 ER. Our projection: 21.0 at a $10,700 salary. We liked him. He was better than we liked him, and that's a good problem to have.
• Drew Rasmussen, Tampa Bay Rays — 34.5 DK points. The line: 6.0 IP, 10 K, 0 ER. Our projection: 18.18. Another arm that outperformed a projection we already felt good about.
• Henry Bolte, Athletics — 30.0 DK points. The line: 3-for-4, 1 HR, 3 RBI. Our projection: 8.31. Bolte, like Goodman, went well past what we had for him.
• Martin Perez, Atlanta Braves — 29.9 DK points. The line: 7.0 IP, 6 K, 0 ER. We had no projection on Perez. He quietly threw one of the best games of the day and we have nothing to add except acknowledgment.

Where We Hit

The pitching calls were the story. Sanchez at 21.0 projected, 35.3 actual. Rasmussen at 18.18, 34.5 actual. Both arms were right in our sights directionally — we had them as the best plays on the board and they delivered big. Goodman also shows up in the best-calls list, and look, credit where it's due: we had him in projections. We just dramatically underestimated what he was capable of on Saturday. Sometimes the model points you toward the right name and then the player just goes ahead and embarrasses the math. We'll take it.

Where We Missed

Being honest here is the whole point of doing this.

• Andrew Abbott, Cincinnati Reds — projected 13.66, actual 2.5. The line: 5.0 IP, 1 K, 3 ER. Abbott had no strikeouts working, gave up runs, and was essentially everything a DFS pitcher start is not supposed to be. We were wrong.
• Riley Greene, Detroit Tigers — projected 12.9, actual 4.0. The line: 0-for-4. Happens to good hitters. Stings when you're in on it.
• Kyle Schwarber, Philadelphia Phillies — projected 12.15, actual 4.0. The line: 0-for-4. On the same team as Sanchez, who was dominant. The pitching was there; Schwarber just didn't do anything with his at-bats.

That's three swings and misses on players we featured. The pitcher calls more than made up for it on the scoreboard, but we're not going to hide behind that. Abbott in particular was a bad day at the office.

A couple of things worth carrying into the week ahead.

First: pitcher upside is real and the model is tracking it reasonably well. Sanchez and Rasmussen both exceeded their projections by a wide margin, but we had them pegged as the right plays to begin with. Being directionally right on an arm that goes for 34 or 35 DK points is most of the battle in DFS — you just need to be in the room.

Second: the gap between our projections and some of the top hitter performances — Goodman's 40-point day against a 10.91 projection, Bolte's 30 against 8.31 — is a reminder that the variance on hitters is real and wide. We're identifying the right names more often than not, but floor and ceiling on any given day at the plate is harder to pin down. That's not an excuse, it's just an honest look at where projection models have structural limits.

Third: nothing cleared our moneyline bar Saturday and we didn't play it. That's how this is supposed to work. Two totals that did clear the bar went 2-0. The discipline and the results are connected. We'll keep doing it that way.