CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings - MLB DFS Strategy: Wednesday, April 20th
Good morning y’all, and welcome to Wednesday! We’ve got a bit of a wonky day with games spread throughout the day and different slates in different places. Our main slate is a 7-gamer on DK starting at the normal 7:05pm ET, while the main slate on FD is starting earlier at 6:40pm ET to include an additional three games. Prior to that, we’ve got a 3-game FD slate at 3:10 and a 5-game DK slate at 1:40. Yippee!
These days filled with games at various times are always fun for real life baseball watching, but less fun for content. We’ll start with a real quick look at these early slates and then I’ll be back in a bit with the main slate analysis.
Early Pitching
The early DK slate is drastically different on the pitching side with the inclusion of the first two games, which give us Shane Bieber and Brandon Woodruff. Including those two, this is what the pitching options look like today:
Shane Bieber vs White Sox (DK
Brandon Woodruff vs Pirates (DK)
Charlie Morton at Dodgers
MacKenzie Gore vs Reds
Tony Gonsolin vs Braves
Zach Eflin at Rockie
German Marquez vs Phillies
Vladimir Gutierrez at Padres
Mitch Keller at Brewers (DK)
Dallas Keuchel at Guardians (DK)
So basically, it’s Bieber/Woodruff, then a significant drop off on DK. But even there, it’s not completely ideal. Bieber has a tough-ish matchup and hasn’t reached 80 pitches yet, while Woodruff has scuffled out of the gate, striking out just four batters in eight innings. From what we’ve seen so far, Bieber is pitching better than Woodruff and even in the limited time we saw Bieber last season, his strikeout rate was well ahead of Woodruff. I fully expect Woodruff to be fine sooner than later, and I am banking on it starting today with the easy matchup. If they were the same salary, I guess I’d lean slightly to Bieber, but with the discount, my preference goes to Woodruff. I’m not confident enough in either to go all-in even on a small slate.
The next best pitcher from a long-term skills perspective is Charlie Morton, but he’s also been just OK to start and he’s facing the Dodgers without much discount. Speaking of just OK, San Diego rookie MacKenzie Gore held his own in his big-league debut, but it was nothing special with only three strikeouts in five innings. Morton is certainly the more trustable pitcher overall, but there is a ginormous matchup difference here, as well as a salary difference. I’m going with Gore as the SP1 on FD and the primary SP2 on DK. This is likely to be the chalky build, and it’s not fantastic chalk, it’s just that there aren’t many choices.