We begin the 2020 Dongers Club Season by taking time to announce the lessons learned, strategy changes and overall plans that I have for the upcoming MLB DFS season based upon a long few months in the off-season to digest 2019 and other prior seasons.
To me, no other major sport has gone through more changes the last few years than Baseball and one can anticipate the sport to continue to evolve under the unfortunate direction of Rob Manfred. We’ve seen the well documented shift towards launch angles & exit velocity with an increased emphasis in upside for at bats at the risk of the formerly perceived negative downside of striking out. We’ve seen some teams adopt a unique approach to handling starting pitching with the use of openers or just generally mediocre arms who are only going to go 4 maybe 5 innings at best before turning over to a setup bullpen from the middle on out. And probably most disturbing last season we saw more teams completely going as bad as they can in an effort to gut payroll, rebuild for the future and just not even bother trying to compete while other teams become more ‘super’ teams.
It should be well known if you pay attention to anything I say that I’ve never been a fan of Rob Manfred, but to me there’s a clear and obvious direction that MLB should head in terms of it’s competitive balance/scheduling/league structure and it has nothing to do with salary caps or finances.
The league is proposing going to a 6 team playoff format in both leagues while also allowing a team to select their opponent. It’s mostly stupid but actually the idea of changing the playoff format isn’t all that bad. You see, one thing that has changed over the years in Baseball is teams now actually understand that sometimes they have no shot at the beginning of the season as the gap between the haves with free-agency money and the have-nots grows. So if they are in a division with too many hurdles to compete in the short term then just go out and be bad all together from the get go. This season we can already rule out the Orioles, Royals, Tigers, Mariners, Marlins, Pirates and Giants from contention. It’s nowhere near as bad as last year where those same teams plus the Blue Jays, White Sox, Rangers, Reds among others went into the season with zero chance at competing.
My proposal is as follows.
- Expand from 30 Major League teams to 32 teams.
- Re-Align to Eight divisions of Four (Similar to the NFL)
- Expand the playoffs to Six teams in each league (Similar to the current NFL)
The expansion aspect is the easy part. Las Vegas and Montreal make perfect spots with Nashville as a distant third city to add a MLB team. Las Vegas is a hot bed for Baseball talent and is proving to be a fine pro sports town. Montreal is just ripping the bandaid off and going back to a city that lost a team prior assuming they offer up a stadium. Nashville would be the leverage in case Montreal cannot get it done.
So we then go to four team divisions
AL East:Â Â Boston, New York, Baltimore, Toronto
AL North:Â Â Minnesota, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit
AL South:Â Â Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Texas, Houston
AL West:Â Â Seattle, Anaheim, Oakland, Las Vegas
NL East:Â Philadelphia, Montreal, New York, Washington
NL North:Â Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Chicago
NL South:Â St. Louis, Atlanta, Florida, Colorado
NL West:Â Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Arizona
The American League re-alignment is the easy part but the National League has an obvious issue between the North and South where you lose the Cardinals/Cubs rivalry and also pairing Colorado in the same division as Miami is … well, weird.  So this is a spot where expanding to Nashville would make a little more geographical sense as they’d slide into the south with Washington and St. Louis/Colorado would both go into the North (or just call it the midwest) while Pittsburgh slides into the East with Cincinnati, Philadelphia and the NY Mets.  Either way you get the general idea.
Then the four division winners plus two wild card teams make the playoffs. By doing this you create an easier path for every team to make the playoffs because each team only has to be better than three teams to earn that automatic berth.
I would make the first round a three game series where ALL three games are at the home team’s stadium. Keep in mind this is two division winners vs the two wild card teams. Unfair? Deal with it. You want to get an easy path then go win your damn division.
Second round would be a five game series 2-2-1 and the Championship rounds would remain best of seven format.
There’s a few other details in regards to balanced schedule and interleague play but I’ll spare you those details and just tell you that the schedule would be reduced to 156 games. The argument against this has always been from purists who said it would ruin the statistical integrity of the game.
Exactly. That’s already been done.
So there Mr. Commissioner. There’s your resolution to your beyond stupid proposal….
THE 2020 DONGERS CLUB
Now onto my thoughts for the upcoming DFS season and what changes you will definitely see form the Dongers Club. Until of course I decide to change my mind by April 23rd or some random date like that.
I played too much last year and the year before and the year before. By too much I mean too many slates and ultimately I was letting the pride that I had in writing analysis for as many slates as possible interfere with sanity of when I should and should not be doing an article.
A lot of this stemmed from me watching or hearing about other “analysts” in the industry who right around mid-March would come out and make claims on Twitter or other media platforms (podcasts, SiriusXM, etc.) and pro-claim that they are a dominant MLB DFS player who you should be subscribing too for content and picks because they’re locked in and will dominate the season. Then you get about two weeks into the season and not only are they not providing weekend content but they’re really not even providing any MLB content either. This was too common where you’d get screenshots of people purchasing a package near $300 for MLB content from these so called “experts” only to get at most two months worth of that analyst and then some random person nobody had heard of was giving out picks on a Thursday, Saturday or the best MLB DFS day of the week — Sundays!
You deserve consistency and I wanted to provide that. But there’s also a healthy balance where I shouldn’t be giving picks 7 days a week – so I am mandating to myself that there’s ONE day when I won’t write and it will be Rob or Rose or FantasyBum who holds the torch only for that day….
Now, which day? Well, it was really an easy process of elimination
- Sundays? Hell no, those are my favorite days to write.
- Tuesdays? Can’t skip Tuesday’s as painful as they can be, they’re the most popular slates.
- Wednesdays? Would never skip the final leg of a series on Wednesdays, plus who wants to miss out on the Eric Hosmer on a Wednesday in August recommendation?
- Friday’s?  Arguably my best day of the week.
So it came down to Monday, Saturday or Thursday.
We all know that the chances of me skipping content on Saturday’s is about as good as me not playing Mike Trout on a Saturday, so it’s Monday which is always a light slate but the first game of the series or Thursday which is ALWAYS a get away day with split slates and usually a very light main evening slate.
Thursday’s it is. That will be the “quiet” day for the Dongers Club this season.
The other major lesson learned from my article last year was the increased demand on analysis for both FanDuel and DraftKings (the major DFS sites still, sorry you FantasyDraft donkeys — how’s that subscription only service working over there at FantasyDraft for the common player? Sure did get quiet…).  So the biggest issue with doing an article for two sites without explicitly saying player A on one site and player B on another site is when I get the Twitter Trolling about my picks and we get into a huge argument about if a pitcher was worth the cost. The fact is, a guy could be worth it on one site and not on another and while the debates/trolling was all good with me — it really had an impact on the bottom line too often with just trying to be “right” about the player rather than “profitable”. It’s something I noted and will be cognizant of this year on my articles and recommendations. I’m also going to recommend Jake Junis a lot less this year, but that’s because he is one of my top 10 busts of the 2020 season which will come out in the next pre-season article.
Dongers Club 2020 Schedule and Notes
When:Â Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – 2 hours before lock.
Off Day:Â Â Thursday’s….
What Slates:Â Â
- Main Slates on weekdays, which will mostly be the evening 7PM lock slates with exceptions for Holidays and the rare Wednesday afternoon Main slate.
- Main Slates on Saturdays as well but if there is a good afternoon slate I will cover those too.
- Main Slates on Sundays (1PM lock) but nothing for the afternoon slate.
- No showdown picks or articles. MLB showdown is stupid
Whats in the article:
- Slate overview, including weather analysis unlike any other
- Top pitcher recommendations for the slate. Ideally three to five at MAX, and many times I will clearly indicate a pitcher as the ‘all in’ spot.
- Positional Hitting Analysis: Position-By-Position, unlike ANYONE ELSE out there doing content, you get very focused list of players at each position and a quick synopsis of where there is depth and where you should just be ‘punting’. Never, ever, ever, will you see an article that lists 9 first basemen and furthermore, if I happen to ever have a lineup without someone I listed and I won a live final seat which is actually staked by someone else you won’t see me tweeting out about how great of a content provider I am because of that type of horse shit….
- Stacks:Â Â When I say stacks, I reference the specific spot of the order and WHY I like the team, not because they have a fricken implied run total over 4.73
- The Dongers Club:Â The favorite plays on the slate and the Chairman who is the HR call of the day.
Those are the five main components that have always been in my article and will remain. But what changes is I will have more data incorporated into articles on Monday’s and Friday’s because these are the beginning of series and honestly you should take data on players/teams for the entire series and use them across the three games. If someone comes in with positive numbers in a ballpark or versus a certain handed type of pitcher but fails on the first day and homers the next day in a good – but not as good – spot then was that variance? Was that the data winning? Was that gut?  How about all of the above? How about we pay closer to attention to the actual games and what is going on and understand it’s a combination of many factors that should drive our decisions.  So you’ll see more of this on Monday’s and Friday’s where its “Series Analysis” in a new section that sometimes will have notes on all 15 series (ahem, i.e. GIFtastic Friday’s) or sometimes it has notes only just four or five series I think are relevant.
What type of player should read the article:
- I don’t care if you play $1 or $100.  I don’t care if you play cash or gpp.
- Article geared to help you build one to five lineups.  I play one to five lineups as well, so should you.
- MME analysis articles are frauds.
My Strategy:Â
- One can legit ask, hey, “Where are the Dongers Club picks actually being played by you the writer??” As of now my main lineups will be FanDuel and not DraftKings. This isn’t to say I won’t have a decent $ tournament entry on DraftKings as well but I will be more focused on balancing the pitching recommendations so that the player recommended is who you should be looking at on FanDuel and as an SP1 on DraftKings. The spots where we take risk are the obvious SP2 spots for DraftKings.  All my analysis for pitching will break down the DK/FD differences but FD will be the lead site for me this year for hitter pricing, stacks and that SP1 recommendation.
Podcasts:
- Sunday evenings / Monday Mornings a weekly podcast. Hopefully with a guest each week — likely Geriak
- Other adhoc podcasts throughout the week.
Strategy Articles:
- I will have articles pre-season in addition to a monthly article and as needed — In other words, if you make a request to me on doing an article on something, chances are I will do it unless it’s a really really really bad suggestion — in which case I’ll just make fun of you in a Friday article with lots of GIFs.
Projections:
- I do not like to over-commit on things but there will be an attempt this year at doing some projections for ‘series’ on Monday’s and Friday’s. Look for this by May if not sooner. Nobody has ever done it the way I am looking to do it and while I am confident in it, we’ll have to adjust as we go.
Do’s
- Read the article.
- Have fun.
- Provide feedback of any kind. Good or bad.
Don’t’s
- Don’t Expect me to block you for negative feedback, however don’t expect me to not fire back if I disagree with you.
- Don’t Ask me to pick between lineup a and lineup b.  My time and analysis goes into my articles. Not slack chats. This isn’t just an arrogance thing, my articles always beat my pre-lock thoughts.
- Don’t Ask me to pick between two players I never mentioned in my article.
- This is probably my biggest pet peeve… Why are you asking about these players? Is it because you want to pick between one of them?  Then make that educated reason as to why you want to select one over the other and live with it. Clearly if I felt one of them was the top play for that position I would have wrote them up and I didn’t. It doesn’t mean they might not have a good game but you as a DFS player should become one that can make your own decisions and analysis into this.  If it’s because some other tout wrote them up and you wanted my thoughts on it then go pound sand. I could care less what someone else recommends. I don’t read any one else’s content and I’m sure they’ll be right a lot but I really won’t get into the day by day player A vs player B stuff because it never pays off.  What I am happy to do, is talk through concepts and scenarios in advance of a slate even happening. Stuff like breaking down how the Texas Rangers hitters are doing on the road versus soft tossing lefties. We can get into that so you can store it away for a future day….
- Don’t Assume you will win every day
- Don’t Assume you will lose every day
