Million Dollar Musings: Thursday, July 6
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.
Happy Thursday! We began with a 7-game main slate tonight, but with the rain-out in Chicago last night and a doubleheader today, the sites have removed that game from tonight’s contests. So, that leaves us with a 6-game slate that looks to be tilted in favor of the bats.
If you’re playing the early 3-game slate, we’ve got some expert tags in LineupHQ, and you can get all my thoughts on that slate with an early Crunch Time at 12:30pm ET.
One important note for tonight’s slate is to keep an eye on the weather in the Royals-Guardians game. The chalky pitcher on the slate is in that game, which starts the day at Orange/Yellow according to Roth. For now, I’m just writing this is as if the game plays clean, but it will throw a big wrench into the pitching plans if the forecast worsens. Come on Roth, help us out!
OK, with that, let’s dig in and find some MLB DFS picks for this Thursday night.
Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
We sort of have a top tier, but everything is close enough to just throw it all in one bucket that looks like this:
Nathan Eovaldi at Red Sox – 24.7% K, 6.3% BB, 2.64 ERA, 3.71 SIERA
George Kirby at Astros – 21.4% K, 2.2% BB, 3.21 ERA, 3.75 SIERA
Julio Urias vs. Pirates – 22.5% K, 5.3% BB, 4.94 ERA, 4.08 SIERA
Tanner Bibee vs. Royals – 24.4% K, 8.4% BB, 3.46 ERA, 4.17 SIERA
Kyle Bradish at Yankees – 23% K, 6.5% BB, 3.58 ERA, 3.99 SIERA
Luis Severino vs. Orioles – 18% K, 9.5% BB, 6.30 ERA, 5.09 SIERA
Kutter Crawford vs. Rangers – 23.7% K, 5.2% BB, 3.92 ERA, 3.77 SIERA
Well, hmmmm. This is a strange little pitching slate. We have a few very good real-life pitchers, but they are up at questionable price tags for their matchups, and a couple others are in very shaky current form. Other than the down season for Luis Severino, all these guys are in a tight cluster of strikeout ability, with most of them being at least solid, if not excellent, with control.
I’m going to work backwards here and discuss the two pitchers who will project well if using long-term data but have big question marks. That would be Julio Urias and Luis Severino. Urias has made just one start off the IL and managed just 2 strikeouts on 66 pitches, while allowing 5 runs in 3 innings. His velocity was fine, and his pitch count should get extended up towards 80 here, so on that front, he’s viable. But my issue is that, even prior to the injury, it had been a shaky season for Urias. He only had two starts in his first 10 outings with more than 6 strikeouts, and he only reached 100 pitches once all year. I don’t like the matchup with Pittsburgh, and Urias has no discount for the limited pitch count. He’s out of my primary pool.
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