CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings - MLB DFS Strategy: Friday, May 13th
Happy Friday! We’ve got a big ole 13-game slate with a lot of high-end pitching tonight. There’s always going to be plenty of offense on a slate this size, but it’s not jumping out first glance. I’m hoping we’ll be able to sort out some tiers with all this as we work through the slate, so let’s get right to it.
Friday Night Pitching
This is a one of those slates where there are a lot of very good mid-tier pitchers that I’m just going to gloss over. If you want to spread way out and play all the options in the $8-$9k range, it is certainly acceptable, but it’s so top heavy here, that I’m narrowing things down significantly and then only chasing savings once we get down closer to $7K or below.
Top Tier Aces And Other Things
Max Scherzer vs Mariners
Gerrit Cole at White Sox
Kevin Gausman at Rays
Clayton Kershaw vs Phillies
Yu Darvish at Braves
Max Fried vs Padres
Logan Webb, Framber Valdez, Josiah Gray, Kyle Gibson, Drew Rasmussen – No Thanks
On DK, the pricing is so bunched up that is basically doesn’t matter. Every one of these 11 pitchers are over $8,000, and Scherzer is the top salary at just $10,400. I have no interest at all in trying to mess around to save $1,000 to play someone like Rasmussen or Valdez when I can just get Cole for $9,600.
It’s not much more spread out on FD, with Scherzer topping the list at $10,700, while the rest of the top six are all over $9K. Only Rasmussen and Gibson are below $8k, and that’s just not enough savings to interest me.
What this means is that until we get down to the next pricing tier, I’m just trying to sort out true aces, most notably Max Scherzer, Gerrit Cole and Kevin Gausman. Clayton Kershaw, Max Fried and Yu Darvish are fantastic pitchers, and of course you can play them, but the matchups and/or lower strikeouts are going to leave them as pitchers #4-6 for me on this loaded slate. The numbers for Kershaw do absolutely put him up with the top three, but he has such a shorter leash that he has much less margin for error. Kershaw is pretty well locked in to 80-85 pitches, while Scherzer, Cole and Gausman are all going 100. That’s a huge difference when pitchers have similar skill levels. Fried and Darvish are just a step behind in strikeout ability and neither has an ideal matchup here.