Week 3 NFL Picks, Predictions & Best Bets | NFL Picks Against the Spread | NFL Props | Survivor
Chris Meaney
It is the second “Opening Day,” with a number of teams that began the season with road trips having their home openers, so we get more day baseball than we would typically get on a Friday. The resulting slate split is a three-game featured slate at 1:05 p.m. ET and a seven-game main slate beginning at 6:40 p.m. ET. I’ll be mainly discussing the main slate and will pop into Discord when time allows to discuss the early slate, and if it is a slow day at the office, possibly the awkward sandwich slate that starts at 4:10.
As always, you will want to give our FTN Daily tools a look and use them in conjunction with what I have to say here. They are all available here:
I wrote up Spencer Strider on the Wednesday slate and then his game got rained out. What I wrote is below in the next paragraph. All of it is still true except he gets the Diamondbacks instead of the White Sox, and it’s a seven-game slate instead of a four-game slate, so he may come at slightly reduced ownership. Or not, because he’s Spencer Strider and he’s sooooo much better than literally any other pitcher in all of baseball.
Wednesday’s note:
The way to think about this isn’t whether Strider is worth it. The correct way to think about this is whether there is a price at which Strider against the White Sox in cold weather wouldn’t be worth it. For me, it’s probably $14,600. Your number might be different. The point remains, you’re going to play Strider, weather permitting, and you’re going to differentiate elsewhere. Yes, the ownership will be sky-high, it’s fine, I promise. This is a delicious piece of chalk I will happily eat.
This write-up could easily be about how abysmal the White Sox offense is, or it could be about how electric Brady Singer was in his first start against the Twins, but the reality is both of those narratives are based on an extremely small sample size and thus fraught with recency bias. The more valid reason to use Singer is not that he struck out 10 Twins on a cold Sunday in March, but that he never, at any point in his career, walks anyone. He’s never exceeded a 10% BB rate at any point in his career, and most seasons he hasn’t come close. He is always around the zone, and that will get you pounded against good teams and set you up for success against bad ones. If you don’t walk these White Sox, there’s just not much they can do to you. Add in the fact that the Royals offense is likely to put up a pile of runs against journeyman Erick Fedde, and Singer might be more aggressive in the zone, and we’re looking quite good. We aren’t getting much of a discount on Singer, but that makes him even more attractive in my mind as the masses will flock to either higher-priced arms that offer more security or lower-priced ones that offer more “value,” leaving our fairly priced Singer with hopefully single-digit ownership. You really want to watch for ownership projections on this one, as this is a key component of this play.
I’m grouping these three together here, as there’s not much difference in price, all of them are facing below-average offenses and Logan Gilbert and Freddy Peralta even have the exact same park factors since they are facing each other (although doing so in Milwaukee is not as advantageous as doing so in Seattle). I don’t see much of a point in making a distinction between these three – they are all safe, but appropriately priced options that would make for excellent No. 2 starters if you are running double cheap stacks. But it will be tough to fit even a single expensive stack if pairing any of them with Strider. We’ll want to keep an eye on ownership level, as the main case for Singer above was that I’m expecting him to be relatively ignored given this triumvirate only slightly above him (especially in Aaron Nola’s case). But if we see any of these three with lower ownership than Singer, they would be an excellent pivot if the lineup construction allows for it.
There are two offenses that are head and shoulders above the rest on tonight’s slate, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. The trouble is they are both extremely expensive, and despite this will also manage to be extremely popular. What I generally do in these situations is not fade these offenses entirely, but try to focus on enough pieces from these stacks that are affordable so that you can still get exposure to the offenses without burdening your lineup with too much ownership. Factoring in price and the typical over-emphasis our fellow contestants put on handedness in elite hitting spots, that is going to lead me to focus on guys like Matt Olson, Kyle Schwarber, Bryson Stott and Michael Harris, who are all in lefty/lefty matchups and don’t have a discount on price. They should go under-owned relative to talent. The model generally has high GPP scores for players like this, but these are chalky teams to choose from to begin with, so it will be interesting to see how intuition and iteration converge.
I know I’m not necessarily uncovering any hidden gems here by picking the three best offenses on the slate and saying good hitters are going to hit well, but sometimes it really is worth it to keep it simple. Also, on a seven-game slate, you aren’t going to have three teams become massive chalk, especially when two of them are very expensive. The Royals are rolling right now, and considering price, ownership and how the pieces fit together for a stack, the Royals might be my favorite option of the three teams mentioned thus far to fully stack when taking into account price and popularity.
In addition to all this chalk, I have to throw in a potential GPP-scores darling, as I expect the Mets will not be popular at all. Hunter Greene is extremely volatile of course, and the thing about volatile pitchers in tiny ballparks who live primarily on elevated fastballs is that the other team hits a lot of home runs against them. It probably will come as no surprise that Greene allowed 2.68 HR/9 at home in 2023 and only .88 HR/9 on the road. If Kyle Harrison is a night at the Kappa house, Greene at home is getting in a car with a girl who has to blow into a breathalyzer to start her ignition. There aren’t many scenarios in which I would suggest getting behind this putrid Mets offense that is somehow off to a worse start than expected, but getting Greene in Great American ‘Small’ Park is one of the few.
