MLB Pitching Pulse: 4-2-18

Pitching is the lifeblood of a DFS lineup, and an important part of keeping those tabs open deep into the night. For those new with us, the Pitching Pulse is focused on providing information on four to five pitchers that are viable in various formats. This is a premium article that will give away one free preview pitcher, while the rest will be for premium members. We take a deep dive into pitchers across all salaries, looking for exploitable matchups, game theory plays, and identify the nightly chalk. Our information comes from our optimizer, FanGraphs, and other various MLB sites listed below. Feel free to comment below, or find us on Twitter at @BrentHeiden1, @JGuilbault11, and @dfcafe. We focus on Main Slates across all content, but will feature blurbs about other slates at times, and can be reached via Twitter or comments.

Morton is coming off a career-best season in 2017, as he went 14-7 with a 3.62 ERA in 25 starts, and he will look to bounce back from a mediocre spring training as he faces off against the Orioles tonight. Morton posted a 2-1 record this spring, with a 4.91 ERA in 18.1 innings, but he struck out 20 hitters in that span. Morton's calling card is his pitch mix, where he has a solid 95 MPH two-seam and four-seam fastball, while also tossing his NASSSSTTTYYY curveball about 30% of the time. He generated 10.9% swinging strikes last season, on his way to a 26.4% strikeout rate overall, and gained first pitch strikes 61.1% of the time. He even developed a solid slider to help put away lefties, which will lead to consistency across the board for him. He also generates a decent number of groundballs, with a 51.8% groundball rate, and held opponents on both sides of the plate to under 28% hard contact. Homers weren't an issue for him, giving up just .86 homers per nine innings, and his xFIP and SIERA suggest that his numbers should stick in line with what he did last season. The biggest concern with Morton is how long he stays in games, as he only pitched six or more innings in 13 of his 25 starts last season, but the strikeout upside he has tonight certainly makes up for that.

Morton gets an outstanding matchup tonight against an Orioles team that has been absolutely lost at the plate to start the season. They were three-hit by Jose Berrios yesterday while striking out six times, they struck out six times against Kyle Gibson, as well, only getting three hits in that game, too, and struck out 13 times with five hits and three runs against Odorizzi and the pen on Opening Day. Looking over some of the Statcast data for those games, there are a few “unlucky" outs sprinkled in there, but even if those would've fallen for hits, the Orioles would still be absolutely lost at the plate. There are some O's bats in the lineup that showed a little pop against Morton's pitch mix last season, mostly Jones, Schoop, and Machado, but they also posted some insanely high swinging strike numbers against them. Morton is in line for an outstanding game here and he is definitely my SP1 across the industry.