CheeseIsGood's Million Dollar Musings: Thursday, September 16th
Happy Thursday! We’ve got a light MLB schedule today with games spread around throughout the day leading to a mixture of small slates in different configurations on different sites. Yippee! On DK, we’ve got a five-game early slate at 12:20pm ET and then a three-game slate at 6:05pm ET. FD is going with a 2-gamer at 12:20, a 3-gamer at 2:10 and then a 4-game slate at 5:05pm ET. Again, yippee! We add some dicey looking weather to the first game of the day in Atlanta as well as the 5:05pm game in Baltimore. On top of just schedule nonsense, we have a plethora of unknown rookie pitchers and/or bullpen games making for some tough spots to break down. What I’m going to do here is give you a Cliff Notes for each of these different slates.
DK Early Slate
The biggest slate of the day contains these five games on DK:
Rockies at Braves – German Marquez at Ian Anderson
Reds at Pirates – Tyler Mahle at Connor Overton
Angels at White Sox – Alex Cobb at Reynaldo Lopez
A’s at Royals – Paul Blackburn at Daniel Lynch
Padres at Giants – Pierce Johnson at Kevin Gausman
There are four good pitchers here with Tyler Mahle, Kevin Gausman, Ian Anderson and German Marquez. Gausman and Mahle are both 28-30% strikeout pitchers and both have continued to pitch well late into the season. Gausman has the tougher matchup, but also the better control. However, at these prices, it’s a pretty easy call to go with Mahle as the SP1 here. The bigger question is to spend up for Gausman as well, or play a cheaper pitcher in the Braves-Rockies game. As much as Ian Anderson looked horrendous prior to his last start, his overall skills and his matchup make him the SP2 for primary lineups. In general, Marquez is a bit more trustable than Anderson, but at a higher price tag against Atlanta, he’s just an MME pivot today. So, out of the top four, Mahle/Anderson looks like the chalky combo, while Gausman and Marquez are good enough pitchers to be worthy of tournament pivots.