Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Monday, April 1st
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 April! The first full month of baseball kicks off with a bit of a whimper on the pitching side. We are down to the end of rotations before the aces start showing back up tomorrow. We have quite a few small samples and tough to decipher situations, so while I’ll do the best I can, there is only so much we can know about some of these guys.
We also need to keep in mind that we are still in the early-season period of unpredictable nonsense. Some pitchers are going to come out of the gate on top of their game, and some will be the complete opposite, so I will again be spreading out far and wide until we get enough data to be useful.
I’ll be Musing about the 7-game main slate starting at 7:10 p.m. ET, but there is also an early 3-game slate at 2:10 p.m. ET. If you want a place to get started for that smaller slate, we’ll have some expert tags available on LineupHQ. Also note that if you’re playing that early slate, be sure to stay on top of things right up until lock, as 2 of the 3 games are starting with an Orange weather tag from Roth.
Monday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
Well, it ain’t pretty out here, but we gotta play somebody! Here is what the slate is giving us:
I Would Prefer To Just Eat Fries, But Will Start With One Of These Five Guys
- Triston McKenzie at Mariners – 4 IP in 2023, good in 2022
- James Paxton vs. Giants – was great when I was a child
- Reese Olson at Mets – 24.4% K, 7.8% BB, 3.99 ERA, 4.06 SIERA
- Sean Manaea vs. Tigers – 25.7% K, 8.4% BB, 4.44 ERA, 3.83 SIERA
- Tanner Houck at Oakland – 21.4% K, 8.9% BB, 5.01 ERA, 4.33 SIERA
I really have no idea what to do here. The two best pitchers based on long-term stuff would be James Paxton and Triston McKenzie. But with Paxton’s ridiculous injury history and the way the Dodgers love to baby their pitchers, I have a hard time imagining a long leash here. On the flip side, he got up to 5 innings and 80 pitches in spring, and even just at that, if we were to see something like the old James Paxton, he’d be a top play here. But in his 96 innings from 2023, he wasn’t the old Paxton. He was decent, with 24.6% K and 8% BB. The matchup is good enough. I just need to see him before he’s anything more than just a guy in the blended mix of ‘play a little of everyone.’
Triston McKenzie had a 25.6% K rate with 5.9% BB when we last saw him in 2022 but missed basically all of 2023 with an elbow injury. When he finally came back to make a couple of starts, he was horrendous. In the long run, I am expecting to see him get back to his old ways this season, but I am not just assuming it happens in his first start. With no good options, he’s absolutely in my pool, but like Paxton, he’s just a guy in the random blended mix of ‘play a little of everyone.’
It’s possible that the correct answer here, besides ‘play a little of everyone,’ is just to take the best matchups. That would give us Sean Manaea and Tanner Houck.
Sean Manaea spent most of last season in the bullpen, but he was plenty good when he got his turn in the rotation. The Mets look ready to get him back to being a full-time starter, which he was for most of his career. He’s always been a pretty good, not great pitcher, but with occasional glimpses of the 25% strikeout range and generally decent control. On this slate, facing the Tigers, I think that’s good enough. I want to point out that the Tigers are really not a terrible team at all against lefties, so this is not some can’t-miss matchup, but it’s still good enough for me to move Manaea up ahead of Paxton and McKenzie. The discount is just an added bonus.
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