Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Monday, July 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 Monday, and let me be the first to welcome you to July! I suppose someone else could have done that already, but it would be weird if someone went out of their way to welcome you to July. We’ve got a slow day with just 3 games spread out from 3:07 p.m. to 8:40 p.m. ET. Normally, I do not write an article for any slates under 4 games, but since this is all we have, I’ll give you a few thoughts on the slate or maybe even more than a few.
But first, I figured this would be a good time to catch up on some big-picture things. You may recall how pretty much everyone seemed to be losing their collective minds over the first couple of months of the season, saying the ball is dead and the offense is dead with it. Offense was certainly down a bit early in the year, but I never had any real lean one way or the other about the ball. Now that we are into the warmer summer months, we can compare large sample size data directly with the same time period in previous seasons.
So, let me ask you this….when you see these numbers, do you think they must come from two completely different types of baseballs?
Exhibit A – 22.8% K, 8.4% BB, .248 AVG, .316 wOBA, .163 ISO, 12.1% HR/FB
Exhibit B – 22% K, 7.9% BB, .246 AVG, .315 wOBA, .161 ISO, 11.8% HR/FB
Personally, I would say it would be a little silly to suggest that these two sets of numbers came from different types of baseballs. If you’re curious, Exhibit A is the league numbers from June 2023. Exhibit B is June 2024. Maybe, just maybe, there is nothing different. I am not making any definitive statements here. I’m simply pointing out that from what I see, there is no reason at this moment to think that anything has changed.
We’ll learn more as we continue into the season and see whether the numbers from 2023 and 2024 match up or whether there is some retreat towards the April-May gap between the seasons. But for now, I am assuming the ball is normal, and the offense will continue to heat up with the weather.
With that, let’s move on to this small Monday slate and see what we can find in these 3 games.
Monday MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
Rather than just doing the usual breakdown of pitchers and then hitters, let’s start with the discussion about how to handle obvious mega chalk on a small slate.
Officially, there is nothing I like less than a 3-game slate with a Coors Field game or any one offense that is clearly ahead of the field.
When we have a situation like the Brewers in Colorado against Austin Gomber, I always like to start with the assumption that the chalk does what the chalk is supposed to do. Quite often, on a bigger slate, the chalk can hit but still be beat. But the fewer games we have, the lower the chance that something else goes nuts. We do have at least two somewhat intriguing pivots in the Blue Jays and Rockies, but overall, I would say the Brewers look likely to be heavy chalk.
If you agree with that assessment, then there are a couple of ways to go about it:
1) Fade the Brewers and just hope that baseball happens. The Brewers can fail just because it’s baseball, and anyone can fail.
2) Go all-in on the Brewers and know that a large portion of the field will be playing the ownership game. It’s not as if we’re going to see 80% ownership on 4-5 Brewers bats, so you can just say you are going to have more combinations of the obvious top plays than everybody else.
3) Match the field and just hope to get very lucky.
Personally, option #3 sounds like a terrible idea to me. I don’t mind that philosophy on a bigger slate because my Brewers stacks are not going to have the same pieces surrounding them. But the smaller a slate gets, the harder it is to get different when you start with chalk. This is especially true today if you start with something like Hunter Brown, MacKenzie Gore, William Contreras, and Willy Adames. That looks like an incredibly obvious build, but it leaves you with just $3,200 per bat on DK. That means there are only a handful of salary savers that are going to work in order to make these lineups fit. With that build, I either want to fade it or have way more variations of it than my opponents.
It would be absurd of me to think that I would be the one who just happens to get the magical combo of salary savers around that chalk.
My favorite option is…
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