Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Thursday, August 15th
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 slow day in MLB with just a 4-game main slate starting at 1:10 p.m. ET. There is a lot of good pitching on this small slate, and we are left without a lot of offense. I will let you know right off the top that this is a slate where I don’t have a lot of strong leans anywhere, and my lineups will be very spread out.
There is also an even smaller 3-game evening slate at 6:35 p.m. ET, and we’ll have some Expert Tags in our MLB lineup optimizer, LineupHQ to get you pointed in the right direction.
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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
We have a reasonably deep pitching pool for such a small slate, but there is one stand-out ace way out ahead of the pack, so he gets his own tier.
TOP TIER ACE
Jack Flaherty at Brewers – 32.1% K, 4.5% BB, 2.97 ERA, 2.72 SIERA
Flaherty is about 10% ahead of the next-closest pitcher on the slate in strikeout ability, with a lower walk rate than any other pitcher on the slate to go along with it. When a guy is that far ahead of the field, I barely care about the matchup. What I’ll say here is that while Flaherty is my clear SP1 without accounting for salary, the skills gap is properly priced in. Both sites have the salaries just about perfect to where you can make a case for anyone. This should also keep ownership somewhat spread out, and assuming that’s the case, I will look to be ahead of the field on Flaherty, with something like 50-60% on DK and 30-40% on FD.
TIER TWO QUARTET
Bryce Miller at Tigers – 22.7% K, 5.9% BB, 3.46 ERA, 3.95 SIERA
Logan Webb vs. Braves – 20.5% K, 6.2% BB, 3.32 ERA, 3.66 SIERA
Max Fried at Giants – 22.7% K, 8.7% BB, 3.56 ERA, 3.76 SIERA
Tobias Myers vs. Dodgers – 22.4% K, 6.4% BB, 2.79 ERA, 4.00 SIERA
The skill sets of these next four pitchers are remarkably similar. All four are within 2.2% of each other in strikeouts and with 0.35 of each other in SIERA. Two of them – Webb and Fried – are ground-ball pitchers, while the other two lean more towards fly balls. The salaries and bunched together enough on DK that it’s not a deciding factor, while on FD, there is enough of a gap to push…
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