Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Friday, July 5th
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! As America begins its next (and probably last) trip around the sun, we get a pitching-heavy 12-game slate to dig through. There are 10 pitchers who could qualify as aces, leaving us with a huge gaping hole after we get past the obvious Royals at Coors Field on the hitting side. We’ll try to find some favorites, but this is definitely going to be a slate with a lot of possible lineup constructions.
Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
This pitching slate is absolutely Kiwi. We start with 10 pitchers who all could have been the SP1 on either of yesterday’s slates. Making this even trickier is that just about all of these aces have tough matchups. I’ll dig through it the best I can, but officially, you can play any and all of these guys, and no one can tell you that you’re doing it wrong.
Tyler Glasnow vs. Brewers – 33.9% K, 6.7% BB, 3.23 ERA, 2.65 SIERA
Cole Ragans at Rockies – 29.8% K, 8% BB, 3.33 ERA, 3.25 SIERA
Luis Castillo vs. Blue Jays – 23.8% K, 6.9% BB, 3.87 ERA, 3.83 SIERA
Tanner Houck at Yankees – 23.9% K, 4.3% BB, 2.67 ERA, 3.10 SIERA
Pablo Lopez vs. Astros – 28.3% K, 5.1% BB, 4.88 ERA, 3.11 SIERA
Kevin Gausman at Mariners – 23.1% K, 6.3% BB, 4.75 ERA, 3.80 SIERA
Nestor Cortes vs. Red Sox – 23.2% K, 4.5% BB, 3.51 ERA, 3.79 SIERA
Max Fried vs. Phillies – 21.8% K, 7.8% BB, 2.91 ERA, 3.60 SIERA
Aaron Nola at Braves – 23.2% K, 5.9% BB, 3.43 ERA, 3.63 SIERA
Tanner Bibee vs. Giants – 28.5% K, 5.8% BB, 3.47 ERA, 3.16 SIERA
This is a crazy ton of great pitching. When I look at this list, my first thought is that Kevin Gausman might be chalk at his lower salary against the Mariners. That leads immediately to my second thought, which is Kevin Gausman is arguably the worst of these 10 pitchers, or at the very least, does not have a standout skill set. As much as the matchup is better than the others, I am not excited about playing a weaker skill set when I can get clearly better pitchers at far lower projected ownership. Of course, it’s very early, and it’s possible that there are so many good pitchers here that the ownership just gets spread out all over the place. I’ll start my analysis with the thought that Gausman is the most popular pitcher on the slate after Glasnow but that he doesn’t reach any concerning level of ownership. With that, I’ll say that I like him, but I still don’t love him.
None of this is to say that I’m anti-Gausman here. He should be good, and he’s shown occasional upside. But overall, the strikeouts are lacking, the consistency is lacking, and I just don’t love it. He absolutely gets a boost from the matchup and high pitch count, and I’d play him in cash games on DK, but let’s see what else we find before getting too excited about a guy with a 23% K rate who could be the most popular option. The reason I brought up Gausman first is that with his salary and matchup, I’m going to be comparing the rest of these options to him.
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