Million Dollar Musings, Part I - Pitchers: Opening Day, March 30
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.
And… we’re back! Happiest of all seasons to you and yours. I’m thrilled to be back with you for another season of musing about baseball and more than a few other random things. If you’re new here, welcome! If you’ve been with me in the past, welcome back!
For the most part, we’ll be doing things similarly to past years. We will start most days’ MLB DFS picks with a breakdown of the pitchers, walking through what stats I’m looking at to whittle things down to my player pool for that day’s games. Then we’ll dive into the bats, looking for stacks, individual power upside, and salary savers.
If you have not followed along with me before, and want a bit of a primer, you can check out these past articles to get a look at how I view things. The first link here will walk through the pitching stats I look at, and the next one will do the same process with hitter stats:
Pitching Stats Primer
Hitting Stats Primer
Some days, I may decide to dive into some side topics or research on the state of the game or recent trends that we’re seeing throughout the season. If there is something you’d like me to potentially touch on in a future Musings, you are welcome to ping me in our RotoGrinders Discord.
If you are in a hurry, or just don’t want to wade through all of my nonsense, I will always conclude both the pitching and hitting sections with the world famous Cliff Notes, where I wrap up my thoughts for the day in a nice, tidy package.
It should be noted, that while you (and spell check) may not recognize all the words I decide to use, they are all very real. Don’t be a grammar jabroni, and we’ll get along fine. With that, let’s jump in and do this thing!
Opening Day Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
Bird’s Eye View
There is one major takeaway from looking at Opening Day pitchers, and you likely noticed this immediately as well. DraftKings has extremely soft pricing, with no pitchers being above $10k, despite an ace-filled slate. Meanwhile, FanDuel, as we saw last season, has tighter pricing on pitching, although the hitter pricing is soft enough that salary isn’t much of an issue overall for Opening Day.
Salaries will move around throughout the season, but I do want to point out that for almost all of 2022, the pitcher pricing lead to tougher overall pricing on FanDuel. You could not simply lock in an ace and a top stack. While on DraftKings, you could almost always get at least one ace along with a high-end stack. This is partly because of the pitcher pricing, but also because DK has a bigger spread in hitter salaries. So a minimum-priced bat goes a longer way on DK.
One more big-picture item of note is that, of course, there are going to be pitchers who improve dramatically this season, or take a step back, or start out the season slow, etc, etc. However, for the first time through the rotation, projections are going to be based on the past data that we have. There are certain pitchers who I will be higher on early in the year than what you see in projections, and I’ll point out where I’m looking to get in ahead of the curve on potential breakouts. But for the most part, I’m just going off of 2022 or longer-term data where we have sufficient sample size.
