Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Monday, June 17th
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 a barn-burner of a slate tonight with a deep pitching pool, and then the Dodgers in Coors Field leading a high-upside hitting slate filled with fantastic hitting weather around the league. I’ll talk through some favorite plays in different pricing tiers, but this is definitely one of those slates where you can build lineups in a lot of different ways.
Monday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
We have a very clear top tier of pitchers and then a slew of decent options with some question marks once we get below that.
TOP TIER TRIO
Sonny Gray vs. Reds – 33% K, 7.2% BB, 3.01 ERA, 2.76 SIERA
Paul Skenes at Marlins – 35.4% K, 4.6% BB, 2.43 ERA, 2.18 SIERA
Max Fried vs. Tigers – 22.4% K, 7.7% BB, 3.20 ERA, 3.42 SIERA
These are three very good pitchers, and yet it looks about as simple as can be. While it’s still only 6 starts into the career of Paul Skenes, he simply looks better than everyone else. Sonny Gray has been awesome this season, but Skenes has a higher strikeout rate, a lower walk rate, and a higher pitch count. On top of all that, he has a lower salary on both sites. I’m not going to overcomplicate this. Skenes is the SP1.
If you want to spread out and play a bit of the ownership game, of course, that’s fine, and if you want to play some cheap bats and go double aces on DK, of course, that’s fine too. In that scenario, I would lean slightly to Sonny Gray ahead of Max Fried, based on the strikeout rate. Max Fried is not without some ceiling of his own, although the 13-K gem from a couple of weeks ago was a clear outlier. But Fried generally has a pitch count of 100+, going 7+ innings in 6 of his last 9 games, which adds to his upside. Meanwhile, Sonny Gray continues to be held under 90 pitches. He’s been so efficient that it hasn’t hurt him, but it does drastically lower his margin for error. All of this is just more reason why Skenes is the obvious SP1.
If I’m spending up for someone other than Skenes, just for the sake of being different, I’ll just hope for another 8-10 K start from…
MID-TIER WITH SOME UPSIDE
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