Million Dollar Musings: Monday, May 22
CheeseIsGood, a two-time winner of a $1,000,000 first-place prize in DFS, 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! I hope you all had a glorious weekend. We’ve got a full week of Coors Field slates—so that is kind of a bummer to kick things off—but we do have a lot of strong pivots tonight that leave Coors as a non-priority on my list. We also have a couple obvious top pitchers in good matchups, but let’s dig in and see what other MLB DFS picks we can find for this 7-game Monday night slate.
Monday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
With matchups factored in, we have a pretty clear top two tonight, with a handful of other options in various pricing tiers:
The Two Aces With Matchup Bonuses
Cristian Javier at Brewers – 28.5% K, 5.8% BB, 3.25 ERA, 3.55 SIERA
Luis Castillo vs. A’s – 27.8% K, 5.3% BB, 3.31 ERA, 3.41 SIERA
Three Something Like Aces
Corbin Burnes vs. Astros – 21.6% K, 8.9% BB, 3.48 ERA, 4.41 SIERA
Bailey Ober vs. Giants – 24.1% K, 6% BB, 1.78 ERA, 4.34 SIERA
Charlie Morton vs. Dodgers – 23.8% K, 8.7% BB, 2.85 ERA, 4.12 SIERA
Who Knows!
Brady Singer vs. Tigers – 19.4% K, 7.8% BB, 7.09 ERA, 4.60 SIERA
Michael Lorenzen at Royals – 18.6% K, 6.4% BB, 3.44 ERA, 4.41 SIERA
Uh…No
Edward Cabrera at Rockies – 30.1% K, 16.4% BB, 5.13 ERA, 4.52 SIERA
Gavin Stone at Braves
The Two Aces And The Leftovers
We have a very interesting pitching slate tonight, including pitchers who have seen a drop in their skills this season, as well as several pitchers clearly on the good side of variance so far this year.
It takes just a quick glance to see the huge gaps between ERA and SIERA for guys like Ober and Morton, while a guy like Singer is completely on the other side of things.
But for a starting point, we do have one pitcher to lock in on who is just quietly going about his business with the best K-BB% on this slate. That would be Cristian Javier. His strikeouts have not been as elite or consistent as last season, but it’s been more than made up for by his improved control. He’s always at a bit of power risk, but he’s only allowed more than one home run in a game once this season. Plus, with the strong control, even if he does allow a couple homers, whoop-dee-doo. Milwaukee likely only has four left-handed bats in the lineup, and while the overall strikeout rate is down, Javier is still at an elite 35% K rate to righties this season. There are enough other good pitchers on this slate that I am not going to call him anything close to a lock button as the highest priced pitcher on the slate, but he is my SP1-A.
