Apr 25, 2016; St. Petersburg, FL, USA; Tampa Bay Rays starting pitcher Chris Archer (22) pump his fist as he is taken out of the game during the seventh inning against the Baltimore Orioles at Tropicana Field. Tampa Bay Rays defeated the Baltimore Orioles 2-0. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Early MLB Picks and Pivots – FanDuel Picks April 30

Welcome to the Saturday edition of Picks & Pivots, a daily fantasy column focused on providing analysis for the upcoming MLB FanDuel slate. The purpose of this column is to first identify key building blocks that can be used for any roster construction and then identify pivot points to help differentiate your lineup in hopes of a big pay day!

FanSided and FantasyCPR have you covered – For additional FanDuel MLB analysis, take a look at my fellow staff writer Matt Rogers FanDuel Economics column or Mike Marteny who provides Draft Kings MLB Picks analysis giving you the most in depth DFS coverage for tonight’s baseball slate.

I will continue to track winning GPP lineups and compare trends over 5 day periods to help us understand what it takes to remain profitable. I HIGHLY recommend each of you do this each morning to look back on the previous night and understand how the winning lineups are constructed in the games you participate in.

The view below tracks GPP entries over various time periods, breaking out key metrics to understand the trends and compositions of GPP winning rosters:

The Previous Day column reflects the Thursday evening slate only as the early day slate results were materially lower and skewed by the postponement of the Rockies game at Coors so I have excluded that from our tracking as that score is a clear outlier. The Thursday night slate winning pitcher was Rubby De La Rosa who put up a dominant 63 points at only $6,400 for almost 10x value. De La Rosa was under 5% owned and racked up 30 points alone from his 10 strikeout performance.

The trends continue to reflect that the “20/80” rule in salary cap management has been the most profitable strategy for GPP’s.

I highly recommend gamers track their game performance across the various types of games they play – GPP’s, Cash, Multipliers etc – as this simple exercise will help teach you more about profitable roster construction than you can imagine.

Now on to the picks…