Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Thursday, April 11th
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 Thursday! We’ve got an early start today with the main slate starting at 12:20 PM ET. I wrote most of this article last night, with the bulk of the content saying how I am prioritizing the three ace pitchers at all costs. Well, thanks to the weather, we are now down to one ace, which could still turn into zero if the MIL/CIN game gets lost to weather as well. I am not going to attempt to rewrite the whole article, but you can feel free to skip over the section about the top three pitchers. Just know that at this point, if the MIL/CIN game is somewhat likely to play, I am just locking in Freddy Peralta and moving along from there.
Be sure to tune into Crunch Time at 11:50 AM ET to get the final assessment of the weather in Cincinnati.
Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
We started with three aces, now we have hopefully one. The rest of the slate is a jumbled mess of kind-of-okay options.
TOP-TIER TRIO
Tarik Skubal vs. Twins – 32.9% K, 4.5% BB, 2.80 ERA, 2.77 SIERA
Pablo Lopez at Tigers – 29.2% K,6% BB, 3.66 ERA, 3.37 SIERA
Freddy Peralta at Reds – 30.9% K, 7.9% BB, 3.86 ERA, 3.45 SIERA
We’ve got a few very good pitchers on this slate. The headline matchup features Tarik Skubal and Pablo Lopez squaring off in Detroit, with another high-strikeout pitcher, Freddy Peralta, taking the mound against the Reds.
All three of these aces were above 29% strikeouts last season, with Skubal and Peralta keeping up that pace through two starts in 2024. Lopez had a tough strikeout matchup in his last start and gets a far better situation today against Detroit. All three of these pitchers have also topped 90 pitches this season, so I have no workload and talent concerns with any of them.
I’m going to attempt to give you some sort of ranking here, but the truth is that I love all three of these aces. It’s very close to a 3-way tie, and I will be playing all of them early and often in various combinations.
But if I have to pick an SP1, I’ll start with Freddy Peralta. I just love the continued improvement in his control to go along with his always elite strikeout ability. There is plenty of power risk here, but the Reds also give him a lot of strikeouts, which just adds to his upside. Peralta gets an even bigger boost when adding in the discount on DK, making it much more realistic to pair him with one of the other two aces.
I’m then going to side ever so slightly with Tarik Skubal as the SP2, though none of this is a slight on Pablo Lopez, who I also love. The difference is just enough quality lefty bats in the Detroit lineup to make me prefer the strikeout upside for Skubal. However, with Skubal, he sees enough of a salary increase on FD that I swap him and Lopez there.
TIER TWO PITCHING
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