CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings - MLB DFS Strategy: Thursday, April 28th
Happy Thursday y’all! We’ve got a very early start today, with a 12:35pm ET main slate that features 9-games on DK and 10 games on FD. I am going to attempt to be less wordy (unwordyer?) than usual to get this up early enough to be useful. I’ll also be on an early Crunchtime to take questions and go over any last-minute thoughts on the slate. No dilly dallying, let’s jump on in!
Thursday PitchingThis is a deep, but tricky pitching slate with no clear-cut answers. We’ve got quite a few pitchers who would pop at their salaries based on 2021 skills, but are scuffling so far this season. This is the bird’s eye view of who I’m looking at today:
Justin Verlander at Rangers
Alek Manoah vs Red Sox (FD)
Michael Kopech vs Royals
Tarik Skubal at Twins
Zack Wheeler vs Rockies
Freddy Peralta at Pirates
Tyler Mahle vs Padres
Jameson Taillon vs Orioles
Bailey Ober vs Tigers
Trevor Rogers at Nationals
Patrick Corbin vs Marlins
If we are not putting any emphasis on 2022 numbers, Zack Wheeler and Freddy Peralta would be jumping out at me at their salaries in favorable matchups. However, Wheeler had a late start to the already late season and comes in with an 8.53 ERA and just a 17.7% strikeout rate. The good news here is that despite some runs, he did look better with five strikeouts and no walks in his last start and the velocity crept up a little. But we still haven’t seen him at full strength, either with pitch count, skills or velocity, so I’m hesitant to go too heavy here. He is absolutely in the mix based on long term skills, and I do think he gets there soon, but where this would have been my first guy in last season, he’s just a guy in the mix today.
The same goes for Freddy Peralta, who also looked a tad better with six strikeouts in five innings last week, but he’s having the same control issues as ever, and while it’s slight, he’s not quite at 100% velocity yet. I like his matchup better than Wheeler’s, plus he’s cheaper on DK, so I put him ahead of Wheeler there. On FD, he’s just sort of in the mix, similar to Wheeler.
Using 2022 data, Justin Verlander jumps up clearly ahead of guys like Wheeler and Peralta, but even there, it’s one outstanding start and a couple of good starts. It appears that while Verlander has some innings upside due to his skills, he is still being held under 90 pitches. We’ve seen 80-85-87, and at this point, I have to assume that’s all we get. On DK, he’s still my SP1 on this slate, but on FD, I’m not much more excited here. There is a $2,600 gap between Verlander and Wheeler, and as much as I’m not thrilled with the Wheeler we’ve seen, I don’t know that 85 pitches against Texas is some kind of must play. Raw points, I’ll put him first, but so far, I see nothing I’m going overboard on at least for FD.