Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Thursday, April 25th
CheeseIsGood, a winner of a $1,000,000 1st-place prize on both DraftKings and FanDuel, is here to give you his musings on the upcoming MLB DFS slate. Whether you are looking for the top pitchers or the best stacks, Cheese has you covered with an extensive deep dive into his MLB DFS picks.
Happy Thursday! We’ve got another early start today, with an 8-game main slate on DK starting at 1:10 PM ET. The FD slate also starts at 1:10 but contains just 7 games, leaving the LAD/WAS game off the slate.
This slate is loaded with good pitching, although one of the marquee matchups between Cole Ragans and Jose Berrios starts out with an Orange weather rating from Kevin Roth. For now, I’ll include that game in the analysis, but be prepared to swap off those pitchers if things don’t improve.
Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
This is a very interesting pitching slate, with multiple aces up top, and then moving through the salary ranks, we get all the way down to a minimum-salary option in the best possible matchup. As usual, we’ll start at the top.
TOP-TIER PITCHING
Zack Wheeler at Reds – 27.4% K, 5% BB, 3.43 ERA, 3.42 SIERA
Yoshinobu Yamamoto at Nationals (DK only) – 32.3% K, 5.4% BB, 4.50 ERA, 2.59 SIERA
Luis Castillo at Rangers – 27.6% K, 6.6% BB, 3.47 ERA, 3.60 SIERA
Cole Ragans vs. Blue Jays – 29% K, 9.5% BB, 3.64 ERA, 3.63 SIERA
Jose Berrios at Royals – 23.3% K, 6.7% BB, 3.25 ERA, 4.03 SIERA
Justin Verlander at Cubs – 21.5% K, 6.5% BB, 3.21 ERA, 4.40 SIERA
MacKenzie Gore vs. Dodgers (DK only) – 26.7% K, 9.5% BB, 4.32 ERA, 4.03 SIERA
I will start by saying that Zack Wheeler and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are the two pitchers here with no real question marks.
Zack Wheeler is as steady and trustable as anyone in the league, right back to his regular 100+ pitches with strikeout upside and excellent control. Sure, there’s always some power risk in Cincinnati, but home runs are just not ever an issue for him, with a remarkable five straight seasons with a HR/9 below 1.00. The Reds power and ballpark is offset by their strikeouts, and if salary is no issue, Wheeler is my easy SP1.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto looks similarly good to Wheeler but with a much smaller sample size, not quite the same innings upside, and more power risk in his skill set. This is a strong matchup, and I fully expect another great start here. I would have no qualms at all about ranking Yamamoto ahead of Wheeler, though I do prefer Wheeler slightly. If I have the salary, these are my two pitchers to start with on DK.
After those two, we start to run into the question marks…
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