Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Friday, August 9th
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.
Editor’s Note: The article from Cheese was submitted before the announcement that the TEX/NYY game has been postponed. We feel it is best to leave his original thoughts in the article and then have Cheese add an update later today at the top of the article with how his thoughts have changed.
Happy Friday! We have an absolutely loaded 13-game slate with a ton of everything. We’ve got high-end aces, a deep mid-tier, and value pitching. On the other side, we’ve got a road team with power in Coors Field, along with teams like the Yankees, Royals, and Phillies in good matchups, to name just a few. At first glance, it looks like kind of a nightmare slate for narrowing down the MME pool, but let’s dig in and see what happens.
With so many games on the slate, make sure you are keeping tabs on our MLB starting lineups page later today as lineups start to roll in.
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Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
Pitching is deep with options in all different salary ranges. We start with two aces who are up above $10,000 on both sites:
TOP TIER ACES
Jack Flaherty vs. Pirates – 31.8% K, 4.5% BB, 2.80 ERA, 2.74 SIERA
Zack Wheeler at Diamondbacks – 27.3% K, 7.6% BB, 2.77 ERA, 3.54 SIERA
Jack Flaherty has been one of the most consistent aces in the league this season, with no flaws in his elite skill set. While he hasn’t popped off for a huge game in a while, he’s regularly sitting around 25 DK points and 40 FD points. He has a solid matchup against Pittsburgh, and to me, he is the clear SP1.
Zack Wheeler has 3 disaster starts this season in 22 games and has otherwise been the same elite real-life ace as always. I’ll side with the 19 good starts over the 3 bad ones. He has as high of a pitch-count ceiling as anyone in the league, and like Flaherty, has a trustable skill set with plenty of ceiling. His matchup is far tougher than Flaherty’s, with much lower strikeouts from the Arizona lineup. Given that Wheeler is the lower-strikeout pitcher to begin with, the choice of Flaherty ahead of Wheeler is a pretty easy one, and I would expect the field to follow that path as well.
There are plenty of good cheaper pitchers on this slate, so I don’t see this as a slate where you absolutely have to play a $10,000-$11,000 pitcher, but where salary allows, Flaherty is the SP1, and Wheeler is a strong pivot at what should be lower ownership.
TIER TWO ACE-ISH
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