The first weekend of action following the All-Star Break is now in the books, and we have a somewhat unique scenario in front of us. We have the entire first half of the season to use as the long-term view of what has happened this season, but we also have exactly one head-to-head series at our disposal. The edge is in reading this weekend’s series, the takeaways by our DFS opponents, and exploiting the disconnect.

We are fortunate. The start of the unofficial second half of the 2021 season didn’t just give us a set of games. It gave us a few extremes. That’s exactly what we want as we build our lineup for Monday.

Check out today’s MLB Grand Slam contest at FanDuel

Monday's Starting Pitcher Strategy

The last few DFS articles I have written personally showed wild discrepancies between the starting pitching salaries on DraftKings compared to FanDuel. That isn't the case on Monday. Indeed, there is some shuffling in the order of the players' salaries, but it isn't extreme like we have seen over the last few weeks. The downside is that we can't use it to target pitchers. Still, we can look at a few pitchers who are higher-priced on both websites. Trevor Rogers, Kevin Gausman, and Luis Garcia are the three that stand out, but I'm not overly thrilled with any. I won't actively fade Gausman or Rogers, but Garcia carries some decent risks at his price point. He hasn't reached the 100-pitch mark since June 1st, and he only threw 88 pitches in his last start -- in which he allowed just two hits and one earned run over five innings.