Million Dollar Musings: Monday, May 8
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! We open the week with an 8-game slate that is tilted towards the pitching side. There are no games with totals above 9 and a lack of obvious top tier offense for DFS purposes. But it’s also a slate where most of the pitchers are more good than great, which still leaves me with a narrowed down pitching pool.
Without further ado, let’s jump in and look for some MLB DFS picks for this Monday night. Actually, it’s not quite without further ado, as it does seem like we should probably talk about how the words ‘a’ and ‘do’ got mixed together to form a word like ‘ado’. I don’t know who got to decide that this was a word, but that jabroni really got away with one. I will investigate and get back to you in a future Musings to see what we can ado about this.
Monday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
TOP TIER PITCHING
Zac Gallen vs. Marlins – 28.4% K, 5.9% BB, 2.54 ERA, 3.15 SIERA
Nestor Cortes vs. A’s – 26.3% K, 6.2% BB, 2.87 ERA, 3.64 SIERA
Dylan Cease at Royals – 29.6% K, 10.6% BB, 2.59 ERA, 3.63 SIERA
Hunter Brown at Angels – 26.4% K, 10% BB, 1.96 ERA, 3.67 SIERA
Logan Gilbert vs. Rangers – 23.8% K, 6.2% BB, 3.32 ERA, 3.74 SIERA
TIER TWO PITCHING
Jon Gray at Mariners – 23.5% K, 8.1% BB, 4.04 ERA, 3.95 SIERA
Marcus Stroman vs. Cardinals – 21.4% K, 7.1% BB, 3.20 ERA, 3.77 SIERA
Freddy Peralta vs. Dodgers – 27.4% K, 8.4% BB, 3.59 ERA, 3.65 SIERA
Anthony Desclafani vs. Nationals – 19.7% K, 2.9% BB, 3.63 ERA, 3.87 SIERA
JP Sears at Yankees – 20.2% K, 7.4% BB, 4.24 ERA, 3.35 SIERA
Miles Mikolas at Cubs – 19.1% K, 4.9% BB, 3.68 ERA, 4.07 SIERA
Even just using 2022-2023 numbers, Zac Gallen looks like the ace of this slate with his strikeouts and outstanding control. But if we just focus on 2023, he jumps even further ahead of the pack, all the way up at a 32.2% K rate. He finally allowed a few runs last start but still had a 6:0 K:BB ratio, and he is now at a silly 47:1 K:BB over his last five starts. I don’t know if he can keep this pace up, but to me, he looks more like the $11,300 pitcher that FD has him priced at rather than the $10,200 on DK. It’s probably not quite a lock button situation since we do have a lot of other good pitchers, but Gallen will be in all of my main lineups. And potentially all of all of them. All of all. Say that a bunch of times fast, and you’ll be wanting some Italian food for lunch.
