Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Friday, September 20th
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! We’ve got a big ol’ 12-game slate that appears to have a very large top tier of pitchers as well as a very large top tier of offenses. While we can always spread out far and wide in MME, this is leaving me with a clear view of how to attack this slate. I’ll be focused on pitchers priced above $8,000 and finding value stacks from my top tier offenses. Let’s dive in and see how that pool looks.
And remember, as we get later and later into September, it is even more important to keep tabs on our MLB starting lineups page as lineups get released each day.
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Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
We have another slate with a lot of good pitching and not a lot of clarity in how to separate the top options. There are 13 pitchers priced above $8,000 on DK, and I’ll be willing to consider 9 of them:
TOP TIER PITCHING
Corbin Burnes vs. Tigers – 22.1% K, 5.9% BB, 3.06 ERA, 3.84 SIERA
Gerrit Cole at A’s – 25.7% K, 8% BB, 3.97 ERA, 3.84 SIERA
Joe Musgrove vs. White Sox – 23.8% K, 6.1% BB, 4.23 ERA, 3.78 SIERA
Zac Gallen at Brewers – 24.3% K, 8.9% BB, 3.61 ERA, 3.97 SIERA
George Kirby at Rangers – 23.1% K, 3% BB, 3.62 ERA, 3.57 SIERA
Charlie Morton at Marlins – 24.5% K, 9% BB, 4.01 ERA, 3.96 SIERA
Jacob deGrom vs. Mariners – 2nd start of deSeason
Cristopher Sanchez at Mets – 20% K, 5.4% BB, 3.24 ERA, 3.53 SIERA
Michael Wacha vs. Giants – 21.6% K, 6.7% BB, 3.29 ERA, 4.15 SIERA
The first thing I notice are all of the strong matchups. The second thing I notice is how several of these pitchers have seen their strikeouts pick up pace down the stretch. When I add those two factors together, I end up knocking George Kirby out of the primary pool. I don’t see any reason to play a lower-strikeout ace in one of the only low-strikeout matchups in this tier. I am next going to knock Cristopher Sanchez down to the bottom of this tier, though not quite out of the pool. Sanchez has been in excellent form, climbing up to a 26.2% K rate in the past month while maintaining his control and ground balls. But still, there are so many teams I’d rather pick on than the Mets.
Corbin Burnes looks like the ‘safe’ ace with his great real-life skills, but he is still looking much more like a ‘good in real life’ pitcher than a DFS ace. He got up to 7 strikeouts against this Tigers team last week, but he has not topped that mark since May, while dropping all the way down to a 17.1% K rate in the past month. There are strikeouts in this matchup, so maybe he can stick around the K-per-inning range, but this is not where I’m chasing elite upside. At the highest salary on the slate on DK, and 2nd highest on FD, he’s just not going to be a priority for me. Very much in the pool but not an SP1.
Gerrit Cole was back to looking like Gerrit Cole before a disaster against the Red Sox in his last start. My lean here is just to chalk it up to a bad outing in a tough matchup and expect a turnaround here in a much higher-strikeout matchup in a better ballpark. He absolutely has some home-run risk against Oakland, but I’m willing to overlook that for the strikeouts. I’m not sure yet if he’s the SP1, but he’s in the pool ahead of Burnes.
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