Free Today Only! Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Friday, July 19th
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.
Happy Friday, and welcome back! I hope you enjoyed a few days off from baseball. I went full unplugged at a cabin in the country, where some random cows occasionally walked past the porch throughout the day. I assume the cows belonged to someone, but I don’t know, they seemed to be pretty much just going wherever they wanted. In the spirit of full unplugged, I even went to the library (yeah, I was also surprised to find they still have those) and ended up reading three entire books in plenty of time to return them so I don’t have to pay the 5-cents-per-day late fee which I assume is still a thing?
Anyhow, I’m ready to get back to the grind, and we have a very busy day with a pitching-heavy 11-game slate. With the depth of the pitching, my assumption at first glance is that we are going to end up with very heavy chalk on the hitting side with the Giants in Coors Field and the Royals flexen their muscles against the White Sox. As I’m writing this early in the morning, we have quite a few unconfirmed pitchers, so just keep in mind that there’s some chance that there are a couple changes to what I have listed, but I’ll update later if needed. And remember that you can always keep up to date on things on our MLB starting lineups page.
Let’s jump right in and see what we find.
Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
Most teams are resetting their rotations coming out of the break, so we’ve got a lot of aces on the mound. This is going to make for a slate with a ton of viable options. I am going to be quickly crossing a bunch of very good pitchers off my board, but I am by no means saying that they are unplayable. If you come to a different conclusion or simply a wider pool than me, that is completely reasonable. The DK pricing is pretty soft, with no one priced above $9,500, and only two pitchers are priced above $10,000 on FD. Because of these salaries, we don’t get any clear way to sort into tiers based on pricing, so I’m just going to start with everyone between $7,500-$9,500 on DK in one group.
SOMETHING LIKE 14 ACES, YIKES!
Jack Flaherty at Blue Jays – 32.1% K, 4.3% BB, 3.13 ERA, 2.63 SIERA
Sonny Gray at Braves – 30.3% K, 6% BB, 3.34 ERA, 2.97 SIERA
Corbin Burnes at Rangers – 23.3% K, 5.3% BB, 2.43 ERA, 3.55 SIERA
Gerrit Cole vs. Rays – 25.2% K, 8.7% BB, 5.40 ERA, 4.04 SIERA
Nathan Eovaldi vs. Orioles – 24.5% K, 6.9% BB, 2.97 ERA, 3.59 SIERA
Tanner Bibee vs. Padres – 28.4% K, 6.2% BB, 3.77 ERA, 3.27 SIERA
Matt Waldron at Guardians – 21.2% K, 7% BB, 3.71 ERA, 4.19 SIERA
Nick Pivetta at Dodgers – 28.8% K, 6.5% BB, 4.18 ERA, 3.33 SIERA
Hunter Brown at Mariners – 24.9% K, 9% BB, 4.39 ERA, 3.83 SIERA
Michael Wacha vs. White Sox – 20.9% K, 7.2% BB, 3.83 ERA, 4.20 SIERA
Chris Bassitt vs. Tigers – 21.3% K, 9.6% BB, 3.52 ERA, 4.38 SIERA
Luis Castillo vs. Astros – 24.2% K, 7.1% BB, 3.53 ERA, 3.83 SIERA
Sean Manaea at Marlins – 24% K, 10% BB, 3.46 ERA, 4.21 SIERA
Spencer Schwellenbach vs. Cardinals – 21.9% K, 5.3% BB, 4.43 ERA, 3.84 SIERA
With so many names here, the first thing I’m going to do is toss a bunch of them into the MME-leftover bucket. There would be a lot of slates where these guys would be primary plays, but tonight, I’ve just gotta make some quick cuts to make things more manageable.
Matt Waldron is the easiest cut as a lower-strikeout pitcher against a very low-strikeout Guardians team. The next cut might seem a little surprising, but it’s Corbin Burnes. The bottom line with Burnes is that he’s pitching more like a great real-life pitcher and less like a DFS ace. This is just not the slate where I want to spend up for a guy who is simply an average-strikeout pitcher at this moment. My next cut is Nathan Eovaldi. This is not because I don’t like Eovaldi; this is not wanting to spend a high salary on a guy facing the best offense in the league.
The two pitchers who I expected would get the early X button — but who are kind of hanging around a bit longer — are Tanner Bibee and Nick Pivetta. Bibee’s skills are near the top of the list, but he gets a downgrade for the low-strikeout matchup against San Diego. Between the matchup and his lack of consistency with strikeouts, he is still going to miss my primary pool. He’s a good enough pitcher that I wouldn’t argue with you at all if you had him closer to the top of your list. Nick Pivetta is the guy I just can’t quit, and this is where I’m going to tell you that I don’t really officially recommend him against the Dodgers, I’m just letting you know I’m going to play him somewhere around a 20-lineup build. The Dodgers are four good batters and then a bunch of mediocrity. A guy with a 28.8% K rate who has 10 Ks in back-to-back games has some upside here. There is downside risk, but assuming nobody is playing him, he makes my pool.
I don’t see anything else to immediately cut, so let’s see what happens when we start searching for an SP1.
In his last start before the break, Gerrit Cole looked pretty much like his old self. The leash is off, as he went 106 pitches, giving him his first quality start of the season. It’s still early, but based on his pitch count and velocity ticking up in his last couple outings, my lean is to say we have a full-strength Cole here. What we need to keep in mind is that full-strength Cole may just mean the 2023 version and not the older elite ace. The 2023 version of Cole was a 27% K pitcher with 5.8% walks and a 2.63 ERA / 3.63 SIERA. Those skills put him right in the middle of the pack tonight but don’t make him a standout. However, he has one of the best matchups of the spend-up aces against a Tampa team that ranks dead last in the league in ISO against RHP. Add in above-average strikeouts with his reasonable salary, and I’m calling Cole the SP1.
The best pitcher on this slate based on 2024 stats is Jack Flaherty. The matchup is not great for strikeouts, but he’s been so elite that I don’t really care. What I do care about is that he threw just 83 pitches in his first start after a back injury, and we really don’t know for certain that he’s at a full pitch count leash. He’s had a couple extra days off, so my hunch is that 90-95 pitches would be back on the table, but there is at least some risk to that ceiling. Officially, I love the skills so much that I am ranking him as my SP2. If I had certainty about his health and pitch count, I’d be heavily invested, but as it is, he comes in behind Cole, which means he won’t be in a majority of my lineups at his salary.
Sonny Gray is an interesting case. His overall skills trail only Flaherty’s as the best on this slate, and much like we saw with Pivetta, the matchup really isn’t as bad as it seems at first glance. Gray is up at a 31.3% K rate with 49% ground balls to righties, and the Braves should give him 5 righties plus a couple of high-strikeout lefties. The big question with Gray is his pitch count. He had been handled with kid gloves, held in the range of 85-90 pitches pretty much all season, before being let go for a season-high 102 pitches last weekend. My lean is that was an outlier, knowing he had a couple extra days off, but it gives some hope for his ceiling. Even if he’s back around 90 pitches, he is good enough to make my primary pool. Gray doesn’t stand out enough to want to pay the extra salary on FD ($10,400), but on DK ($9,200), he’s basically even with Flaherty as my SP2.
Once we get past Cole, Gray, and Flaherty, we find a nice little salary gap down to this group closer to the $8,000 mark on DK: Luis Castillo, Hunter Brown, Michael Wacha, and Chris Bassitt. From there, we get another slight few bucks in savings down to Sean Manaea and Spencer Schwellenbach.
We are getting more than just the salary savings; we are also getting some better matchups here, particularly for Hunter Brown and Michael Wacha. Wacha would be the odd man out if the matchups were all the same, but facing the White Sox is enough to keep him in the discussion. I still don’t like the strikeout ability enough for Wacha to get him into the primary pool, but I can’t cut him either. Let’s see what happens with these other options and then decide where Wacha fits.
Hunter Brown has just 1 bad start in his last 10, grabbing 9 quality starts and posting a 26.3% K rate with 7% walks over that stretch. Adding in his ground-ball ability and facing the highest-strikeout team in the league against RHP, I’m in on Brown. With salary factored in, I’m willing to call him my top pitcher on DK and behind only Cole on FD.
Opposing Brown is Luis Castillo, whose long-term track record has him looking a tad underpriced on DK ($8,200). He still hasn’t shown any real consistency with strikeouts, but while it’s a tougher matchup in general, his splits help him out here. Look at these numbers for Castillo this season:
Castillo vs. righties – 29.6% K, 5.8% BB, .127 ISO allowed, .250 wOBA allowed
Castillo vs. lefties – 17.9% K, 7.6% BB, .217 ISO allowed, .367 wOBA allowed
These are dramatic splits, and he’s basically an elite ace against righties and simply a below-average pitcher to lefties. Houston may use 2-3 other lefties, but essentially, this team is Yordan Alvarez and a bunch of righties. This is a good enough matchup for me to also put Castillo ahead of Wacha, but I do prefer Brown. On DK, they are both cheap enough to make the primary pool, and I’ll consider pairing them together if I can’t afford a $9,000 option.
I want to like Chris Bassitt here, but I really don’t. Similar to Castillo, he’s much better against righties and simply a below-average pitcher against lefties. Adding in the control issues he’s shown, assuming he sees at least 4 lefties, I’m going to play Wacha ahead of him. That leaves him in 4th place among these 4 in the $8,000 range, which knocks him out of the primary pool.
Sean Manaea is my favorite pitcher below $8,000, but we’re only talking about a $600-$800 discount from Castillo and Brown. The matchup is a big plus, mostly with run prevention, as the Marlins are one of the lowest-power teams against LHP before even adding in the good pitching ballpark. I don’t love his lack of consistency, but it certainly looks like a spot where he should be fine. I prefer all of Brown, Castillo, Wacha, and Bassitt, but Manaea is just barely below Wacha and Bassitt, so if I need the few extra bucks, he’s playable.
Spencer Schwellenbach has been really good for the Braves, and I somewhat believe in what we’re seeing. However, that still mostly means that I believe in his strong control, and with just an average 21.9% K rate and a pretty tight cap on his pitch count ceiling, I just don’t love him on a slate this loaded. I prefer Manaea, which knocks Schwellenbach down into the MME bucket.
SALARY SAVERS
Edward Cabrera vs. Mets – 32.1% K, 11.5% BB, 8.26 ERA, 3.47 SIERA
JP Sears vs. Angels – 17.6% K, 7.4% BB, 4.56 ERA, 4.72 SIERA
Griffin Canning at A’s – 15.7% K, 8.1% BB, 4.84 ERA, 4.92 SIERA
On a slate with so many aces, we are very likely to see some big pitching scores. This makes me less excited to chase the type of cheap nonsense where we’re just happy with 10-12 DK points. That is going to remove Griffin Canning from my list completely. The guy just isn’t very good, and I can’t upgrade him enough for the matchup to get him into the pool.
If you want to chase some extremely risky upside, Edward Cabrera is your guy. He has been completely shellacked this season, but as always, he is showing massive strikeout ability, giving him a lot of per-inning upside. Even in his last start, when he allowed 4 HRs and 7 runs in 3+ innings, he showed that upside with a 7:0 K:BB ratio. There is always a ton of control risk to go along with the power risk, but at least the power risk is somewhat mitigated by the ballpark. The matchup with the Mets looks tough enough that I expect to see the downside version of Cabrera, but he’s just cheap enough where I will play him here and there in very large-field, 1st-place-or-bust tournaments. He will not make my first 30-40 lineups, and I’ll expect to lose with any lineup he’s in, but he’s just the kind of nonsense dart throw that can win the day a couple times a season.
JP Sears has come back to life in his last 3 starts, with an impressive 20:4 K:BB ratio. As a fly-ball pitcher dependent on HR/FB, he always gets a boost pitching at home. He’s the only cheap pitcher that I am considering on FD, where batted-ball luck does have the potential to give him a quality start. On DK, if I needed something in the $6,000 range in a smaller-field tournament, I would play him ahead of Cabrera. There is not a lot of realistic upside, but there is also not nearly as much realistic downside as with a guy like Cabrera. My initial plan is to stick with two pitchers above $7,500 on DK and stay above $9,000 on FD, but officially, Sears is my go-to cheap option where the salary relief is completely necessary.
PITCHING CLIFF NOTES
Folks, this is one of the most jumbled pitching slates we’ve had since April. With almost every team back to the top of their rotation, there are just a ton of solid options. I’ll say again that there is no clear best answer, and you could have a completely different ranking or different sized pool than me, but this is how I’m sorting things.
FD – The bulk of my pool is going to be Gerrit Cole, Jack Flaherty, Hunter Brown, and Luis Castillo. I don’t see the need to spend up above Flaherty, though if the salary is sitting there, I’ll include Sonny Gray as well. As far as cheaper stuff, there is just not enough discount for guys like Michael Wacha or Sean Manaea. Until we get all the way down to a dart throw like JP Sears, I’d rather just stick with the $9,000-$10,000 range.
DK – There will be plenty of lineups where you can afford anyone you want, and in that instance, I lean to Gerrit Cole and Jack Flaherty, followed by Sonny Gray. If you had Tanner Bibee, Corbin Burnes, or Nathan Eovaldi in this group, I wouldn’t yell at you. I am also going to include some Nick Pivetta as my 4th spend-up option.
The slight savings down to Hunter Brown and Luis Castillo might be enough to make them my highest-owned pitchers, and then I’ll add in some sprinkles of Michael Wacha and Sean Manaea. You could just as reasonably have Chris Bassitt or Spencer Schwellenbach here, but they are missing my cut.
At the cheap end, I’ll throw a few nonsense darts at Edward Cabrera in large-field tournaments and a few darts at JP Sears where the savings are necessary to get the bats I want.
Friday Hitting: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
With all the good pitching, the hitting choices are slim. We end up with a small and obvious top tier that really just includes two teams: the Giants and Royals. I’m going to add a couple more to the top tier and then will be mostly just picking out a few individual bats beyond that before we get into random MME dart throwing.
TOP TIER OFFENSE
- San Francisco Giants at Cal Quantrill
- KC Royals vs. Chris Flexen
- Colorado Rockies vs. Kyle Harrison
- LA Dodgers vs. Nick Pivetta
- Boston Red Sox at Gavin Stone.
The Giants have far and away the top projected total, and while it’s nice that they get a Coors Field bump, this is really not a creation of the ballpark. Cal Quantrill is one of the only below-average pitchers on this slate, and the Rockies have the worst bullpen on this slate. If this game were in San Francisco, maybe I’d have the Royals ahead of them, but this would still be one of the top two offenses.
The real trick here is that DK has again done a good job of pricing up Coors Field bats, so even if we all agree that the Giants are the top team, it’s not necessarily the best stack for DFS purposes. Unfortunately, FD has not followed suit, and with everyone priced down, it’s a much tougher fade, where we should see massive ownership.
When you look at the skills for Quantrill, this is what you get:
Quantrill vs. righties – 15.7% K, 5.9% BB, .150 ISO allowed, .341 wOBA allowed, 45% GB
Quantrill vs. lefties – 20.4% K, 12.4% BB, .175 ISO allowed, .324 wOBA allowed, 48% GB
Basically, he’s just throwing strikes to righties and hoping for the best with BABIP, while he’s a bit wilder against lefties. When I look at those numbers with the hard-hit ability of the Giants, I love this matchup more than I would like to. The Giants have 6 of their top 7 batters with barrel rates above 9% and hard hits over 50% against RHP this season, mostly with fly-ball leans as well. When you remove strikeout risk from the righties due to the matchup, this looks like pretty good chalk. It’s baseball, and anyone can fail on any slate, but I’m going to be letting everyone else overthink this one. Officially, Matt Chapman, Michael Conforto, Jorge Soler, and Heliot Ramos are my top options, but I’ll be mixing-and-matching all 9 batters in Giants stacks early and often.
If there’s a team that can beat a good Giants game, it looks like Kansas City is the most logical option. Chris Flexen is down at a 17% K rate to both sides of the plate, he doesn’t have any ground-ball lean, and there is another bad bullpen behind him. Bobby Witt is my top bat on the slate, and I would play him and Salvador Perez on their own ahead of any of the Giants bats. Past those two, while I like Vinnie Pasquantino, Hunter Renfroe, and Michael Massey, I prefer the Giants bats once we get past Witt and Perez.
There’s a sizeable gap after the Giants and Royals, but we can at least find a few high-end individual bats and mini stacks to look at. The Dodgers top four all have clear upside with strikeout risk against Nick Pivetta. When Pivetta is not getting strikeouts, he is allowing fly balls, which has led to a .215 ISO allowed to righties and a .173 ISO allowed to lefties. His strikeout ability moves Teoscar Hernandez down the list a bit, but Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, and Will Smith are in the primary pool. Because of the salaries, I’m more likely to use them on their own, with the full stack being just kind of OK.
On the other side of the Dodgers game, we find a very good Red Sox lineup against the still fluky-looking Gavin Stone. Stone has a .290 BABIP and 7.7% HR/FB rate, hiding his 4.32 SIERA behind a 3.26 ERA. He is not at all a bad pitcher, and even that 4.32 SIERA is completely acceptable, but on this particular slate, it still makes him one of the more attackable pitchers. At the very least, Rafael Devers is a top tier option, and if salary is no issue, Jarren Duran joins him up there. The batted-ball numbers look fantastic for Wilyer Abreu against RHP, so he is my favorite salary-saving option here, and then I’ll just be looking to Red Sox stacks, ranking them ahead of the Dodgers.
The Rockies are never exciting, but they are also a team with plenty of righty power and facing a guy, Kyle Harrison, with a 17.5% K rate and no ground-ball ability. Stacking the Rockies always has downside because of the strikeouts, but they have 6 righties with ISOs above .180 against LHP this season. My favorites are Ezequiel Tovar, Michael Toglia, and Brenton Doyle. When I factor in the salaries, I end up liking the Rockies as much as any team on this slate, including the Giants. That puts them up to 3rd place on my list, and overall, I am considering the Giants, Royals, and Rockies to be the top tier by themselves, with a gap between them and the Red Sox, Dodgers, and everything we find next.
TIER TWO OFFENSE
- NY Yankees vs. Zach Eflin
- Baltimore Orioles at Nathan Eovaldi
- NY Mets at Edward Cabrera
- Detroit Tigers at Chris Bassitt
- Cleveland Guardians vs. Matt Waldron
- LA Angels at JP Sears
- Oakland A’s vs. Griffin Canning
We have had a lot of slates recently where the top tier has been so big that there has been little reason to goof around with tier two leftovers. But tonight, we don’t really have that situation. The Giants and Rockies are not can’t-miss teams in any matchups, and it’s not asking that much for such a small group of top tier offenses to fail.
For that reason, I’ll be playing some stacks that I don’t love pretty early in my builds. When I look at this tier, I separate things a bit more into these two camps:
INDIVIDUAL BATS – Yankees, Orioles, Tigers, Guardians
STACKS – Mets, Angels, A’s
The main reason for this separation is the talent of the opposing pitchers. You can always stack the Orioles and Yankees, but I’m not thrilled to load up against guys like Zach Eflin and Nathan Eovaldi. But I do love Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Gunnar Henderson. The thing about Eflin and Eovaldi is that they both throw strikes. If I’m going to spend up on an individual bat, I like knowing that they are likely to see pitches to hit. In particular, Eflin has just a 1.7% BB rate to righties and a 2.7% BB rate to lefties. With his lower strikeouts to righties, Judge is my top spend-up bat outside of the top tier.
A couple other bats that I am prioritizing are Tigers lefties against Chris Bassitt, notably Riley Greene. Bassitt is a below-average pitcher to lefties, while Greene has a .232 ISO with a 14% barrel rate against RHP this season. I am also including the big Cleveland bats, Jose Ramirez and Josh Naylor, along with Angel Martinez as a salary saver, against Matt Waldron. Waldron is another pretty good pitcher but basically just average against lefties this season (21.6% K rate and .183 ISO allowed).
When it comes to stacking, I don’t love that the three teams I’m considering are playing in Miami and Oakland, but the slate gives us what the slate gives us. I talked about Edward Cabrera in the pitching section, and to reiterate, the good Cabrera could strike everyone out, but the bad Cabrera is filled with walks and home runs. I have basically no interest in individual Mets bats, with the likelihood of each at-bat being a strikeout or a walk, but I do love the upside for the stack.
It is quite viable to play some individual power bats in the LAA/OAK game, especially the ones who are at a discount, but it’s also tough to try and pick out the right pieces, especially with a team like Oakland who adds strikeouts to the bad hitting ballpark. Brent Rooker, JJ Bleday, and Shea Langeliers are very legitimate power bats, but they are not standouts compared to similarly priced bats elsewhere. Seth Brown and Lawrence Butler are still cheap enough on DK to warrant being included on the list of one-offs, but overall, I do prefer just full-stacking the A’s. On the other side, I feel similarly about Taylor Ward and Logan O’Hoppe as I do with guys like Rooker, Bleday, and Langeliers. These are good hitters with legitimate power, but they aren’t exactly priorities either. If they just to happen to fit somewhere, great, but this is more of an MME stack.
HITTING CLIFF NOTES
As I dig through everything on the slate, I basically conclude that if I’m not just stacking the obvious Giants or Royals (and I include the Rockies there as well), then my lean is to pick out some high-end, one-off bats and then just land on completely random dart throwing, where anything on the slate is viable. This is going to mean that I will be over the field on the chalk bats, which is never my favorite plan of action, but again, the slate gives us what it gives us. Here is how I have things ranked:
STACKS – Giants, Royals, Rockies, gap, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, A’s, Yankees, Orioles, Angels, Guardians, Tigers
SPEND-UP BATS – Bobby Witt, Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Matt Chapman, Jorge Soler, Gunnar Henderson, Juan Soto, Rafael Devers, Jose Ramirez, Will Smith, Freddie Freeman, Riley Greene, Yordan Alvarez
MID-TIER MARVELS – Salvador Perez, Ezequiel Tovar, Michael Toglia, Vinnie Pasquantino, Taylor Ward
SALARY SAVERS
FD – All Giants, Brendan Rodgers, Jacob Stallings, Hunter Goodman, Sean Bouchard, Wenceel Perez, Angel Martinez, Shea Langeliers, JJ Bleday, Taylor Ward, Logan O’Hoppe, Adam Frazier, Kyle Isbel, Andy Pages, Wilyer Abreu, Masataka Yoshida
DK – Sean Bouchard, Jacob Stallings, Lawrence Butler, Seth Brown, JJ Bleday, Shea Langeliers, Angel Martinez, Daniel Schneemann, Colt Keith, Wenceel Perez, Adam Frazier, Hunter Renfroe, Kyle Isbel, Masataka Yoshida
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