Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Monday, July 22nd
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! We’ve got an interesting 9-game slate, with a bunched-up group of pretty good pitchers but nothing that looks like a can’t-miss. On the hitting side, things are headlined by Boston traveling to Coors Field, but after that, it’s just another big tangle of kind of OK, with nothing really jumping off the page. Let’s dive in and see if we can find any gems hiding somewhere in the tangle.
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Monday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
I’m going to sort the pitchers into two buckets based on DK pricing. We have a bit more salary separation with the FD pricing, but we’ll sort that out as we work through it.
TOP TIER PITCHING
Cole Ragans vs. Diamondbacks – 29.6% K, 8% BB, 3.16 ERA, 3.30 SIERA
Hunter Greene at Braves – 27.6% K, 9.9% BB, 3.34 ERA, 3.81 SIERA
Bryce Miller vs. Angels – 22.7% K, 6.7% BB, 3.63 ERA, 3.97 SIERA
Reynaldo Lopez vs. Reds – 24.6% K, 8.8% BB, 1.88 ERA, 3.96 SIERA
Ranger Suarez at Twins – 24.5% K, 5.7% BB, 2.76 ERA, 3.29 SIERA
Tanner Houck at Rockies – 23.5% K, 5.5% BB, 2.54 ERA, 3.29 SIERA
Bailey Ober vs. Phillies – 26.5% K, 6% BB, 4.14 ERA, 3.55 SIERA
On DK, all 7 of these pitchers are bunched between $8,300-$9,000, which makes salary basically irrelevant, and we can just play whoever we prefer out of this group. On FD, it’s a bit more spread out, with Ragans all the way up at $10,900 while Miller is all the way down at $8,600, making salary more a factor.
What we find in this group is that two pitchers have bigger strikeout upside (Cole Ragans and Hunter Greene), Bryce Miller has the best matchup, and there are four good real-life pitchers in just OK matchups. What I’ll point out among those four leftovers is that the matchup is also pretty good for strikeout upside for Reynaldo Lopez, so I’m putting him with Miller in the good matchup category.
Where that initial look leaves me is that Tanner Houck, Ranger Suarez, and Bailey Ober are really just MME leftovers. These are all good pitchers, so if you wanted to move one of them up into your primary pool, I have no issue with that. I’m just trying to find a place to draw some lines, and that is where those lines end up.
At the top end, I would say Cole Ragans is definitely the best DFS pitcher of this group overall, however, he also has the lowest-strikeout matchup of anyone. Arizona is very tough on LHP, with only 3 of their projected batters above an 18% K rate this season. Ragans is still arguably the SP1, but let’s see what else we find first.
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