Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Thursday, July 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 Birthday America! This holiday slate gives us an early start, with a main slate starting at 12:35 PM ET on FD (8 games) and 1:05 PM ET on DK (7 games). We have an extremely tangled pitching slate with a slew of good, but not great, options, which also leads to the same thing on the hitting side. Fortunately, after all is said and done, we still get burgers, hot dogs, and fireworks, so everyone is a winner!
If you’re playing the later 4-game slate after the apple pie has been served, we’ll have some Expert tags and blurbs in our MLB optimizer, LineupHQ, to help get you started.
Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
It’s an absolute mess out here today. It’s not really a bad mess, it’s just a pile of stuff that you can’t really throw away but don’t how to sort through or where to put it.
Top Tier Pitching Tangle
Bailey Ober vs. Tigers – 26.1% K, 6.5% BB, 4.30 ERA, 3.62 SIERA
Cristopher Sanchez at Cubs – 21% K, 6.4% BB, 2.41 ERA, 3.31 SIERA
Nick Pivetta at Marlins – 26.7% K, 6.3% BB, 4.52 ERA, 3.49 SIERA
Max Scherzer vs. Padres – 3rd start of season
Michael King at Rangers – 27.2% K, 9.2% BB, 3.61 ERA, 3.66 SIERA
Framber Valdez at Blue Jays – 19.3% K, 8.2% BB, 4.11 ERA, 3.75 SIERA
Ben Lively vs. White Sox – 21.3% K, 7.3% BB, 3.03 ERA, 4.19 SIERA
Chris Bassitt vs. Astros – 21.8% K, 8.9% BB, 3.24 ERA, 4.17 SIERA
Jameson Taillon vs. Phillies – 18.5% K, 5.4% BB, 3.03 ERA, 4.32 SIERA
Bailey Ober has been fantastic recently, with 27 strikeouts in his last 3 starts, and while his overall numbers for the season aren’t elite, they are as good as anyone else’s on this slate. If the weather allows it, Ober looks like the pretty clear SP1. The top 5-6 pitchers are all very close, and assuming Ober is the chalk, this is not anything like an all-in situation, but he will be the first guy in my primary lineups. The initial report on our MLB weather page is saying this game is unlikely to go 9 innings, but it’s also unclear if/when a delay would come. At this point, I’m going with the assumption that we get enough innings from Ober to leave him in the pool as the SP1. But this does make him more of just another guy in the big tangle, rather than a clear standout.
Max Scherzer has gone from 57 up to 77 pitches in his first 2 starts, and I would assume he’d be allowed to go something around 90 pitches today, which puts him right in the thick of the discussion for SP1. The problem here is that…
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