Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Thursday, April 4th
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 a very slow day, with just 4 games on the DK main slate starting at 4:05 PM ET. FD’s main slate will have the same start time but only includes the first 3 games.
On slates this small, everything is going to be viable in tournaments, but I will sort things out as clearly as possible. We end up with a very clear dividing line on the pitching side, with a top four that will correlate to an opposite top four on the hitting side.
Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
With only 8 pitchers on the mound, I’ll list all of them here, broken up into these two tiers:
TOP-TIER PITCHING
- Pablo Lopez vs. Guardians – 29.2% K, 6% BB, 3.66 ERA, 3.37 SIERA
- Tanner Bibee at Twins – 24.1% K, 7.7% BB, 2.98 ERA, 4.19 SIERA
- Seth Lugo vs. White Sox (DK) – 23.2% K, 6% BB, 3.57 ERA, 3.97 SIERA
- Lance Lynn vs. Marlins – 23.6% K, 8.3% BB, 5.73 ERA, 4.33 SIERA
Bibee had one of the most disappointing starts of any chalk pitcher so far this season when he had a surprising 5 walks in 4 innings against Oakland. He had strong control in his rookie season, so this was a complete shock, and I am tempted to just give him a pass and call it one bad outlier start. He had the exact same 11.2% swinging strike rate as last season, and while his fastball velocity was not quite full strength, I don’t see a red flag, and his curveball and changeup usage were the same as ever. If you want to sit this out until he looks good, I won’t argue with that, but on a small slate, I’m still in.
However, Bibee’s opponent, Pablo Lopez, was the much better strikeout pitcher last season, and Lopez had no issues in his first start, going 7 strong innings with 7 strikeouts and 0 walks. As with everyone facing the Guardians, it’s a good news / bad news matchup with low strikeouts but also a lack of power outside of a couple middle-of-the-order bats. Meanwhile, the Bibee side of this matchup has a lot more strikeouts in the lineup but also more power up and down.
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