Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Opening Day 3/26

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2026-03-24 17:35:43 Premium Content Part of the product MLB DFS

Whether you are looking for the top pitchers or the best stacks, Dave Potts (aka CheeseIsGood) has you covered with an extensive deep dive into his MLB DFS picks today. Cheese, one of the preeminent baseball minds in all of fantasy sports and a winner of a $1,000,000 1st-place prize on both DraftKings and FanDuel, is here to give you his musings on the March 26, 2026 MLB DFS slate.

Happy 2026! I know many of you may have already started in on 2026, but for those of us who haven’t taken part yet, it’s time to begin! Welcome back to everyone who has been reading along with me in previous seasons, and if you’re new here, we’re thrilled to have you on board.

The goal of the Musings is really three things wrapped up into one:

1) Dig into each day’s MLB games and figure out a plan of attack for that day’s DFS slate.
2) Deepen our understanding of how to analyze stats and trends in MLB player and DFS analysis. The thought process and research process of a slate is more important and useful for the long term than just trying to find a list of who to play that day.
3) Have a little fun in a long season. Mostly through dad jokes, made-up words, and subtle references that often make sense only to me, we’ll try to make sure we’re getting a little entertainment. It doesn’t always seem like it, but this really is supposed to be fun!

For the majority of the season, I will write every Monday through Friday, and our friend Justin Van Zuiden (aka stlcardinals84) will take over on Saturday & Sunday with his Covering The Bases article that follows the same basic structure of a full-slate breakdown. We’ll be writing about all featured slates that have 5+ games.

We will walk through the pitching options, followed by identifying top stacks and individual batters, with the goal of shrinking the player pool to a manageable size. The goal is never to talk about every viable option or to tell you exactly who to play. The goal is for you to get an overview of the slate and insight into why and how I have narrowed down my player pool. Some days there will be a lot of words (probably every day there will be a lot of words), but I’ll always end each section with the world famous Cliff Notes, giving a brief and to-the-point summary of my plan of attack for the slate.

I am also going to start this season with a promise that I have never felt the need to make before, but hey, this is the world we live in now – I am a real human person writing this. And I am going to be a real human person writing this every single day. We all have robot friends that can write more words than me, faster than me. And those non-human things can even be trained to sound exactly like me. In fact, if I were a robot in a server somewhere, I would likely be tempted to say something like “I am a real human person writing this,” though I doubt I’d be as tempted to say that those robots are mostly a bunch of jabronies making the world a far less interesting place. So, as my editors can attest to, I am very much a real human person, and you’ll be getting my genuine, spur-of-the-moment thoughts every day. If you want to have your robot friends summarize my article and read it back to you, well I can’t stop you, but there will for sure be words they don’t know how to pronunciatize. Okay, back to baseball!

As we start this season, as always, I am just going to dive in head first and analyze things as if we’re in mid-season form. If you’re new, it may take you a few days to get used to the format and seeing the stats in the way I use them, but you can always hop in the MLB channel of our RotoGrinders Discord if you have any questions, and me or my very real friend, Virtual Dave 7.0, will be happy to answer your questions 😊

As for Opening Day baseball, a few notes before we begin. I am writing this on Monday, and while we know most of the pitchers, there may well be some changes before Thursday. I’ll be adding updates at the top of this article through first pitch, as needed. I glanced at the weather in some of these games but will need to look at that again Thursday morning, and I will add an update if any thoughts change. The one potentially important weather note is in Chicago, where initially it looked like there would be winds blowing out, but it has since shifted to more likely being good pitching weather. And of course, that shift happened after I had already started writing about the Cubs being the top stack. The 2026 season is acting a little shaky already!

The biggest thing to note, as is the case every year, is that we will never know less than we know on Opening Day (or in the first time through the rotation for all pitchers). All we have to go on are stats from previous seasons, and unless there are injuries or some very clear sign of a change, I am just basing everything on 2025 stats and assuming everyone is exactly who they were last season. In reality, there will be players who make changes and improve (or fall back from their old numbers), but until we start to get some 2026 sample size, we don’t know who it will be. With that, I recommend spreading out further than usual with your player pool early on and being even more skeptical of chalk than we should always be. And now…away we go!

Opening Day Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

We are loaded with high-end pitchers, and nearly everyone on this slate is playable. I’ll look at pitch counts from Spring Training, but in general, the assumption should be that most pitchers can get to the range of 80-90 pitches in their first start, and it’s very unlikely we see any leashes of 100+ pitches like we will build into as the season moves along. I’m going to sort things into four tiers, though you could draw these lines in a lot of different places.

ACES AND MORE ACES

• Tarik Skubal at Padres – 32.2% K, 4.4% BB, 2.21 ERA, 2.71 SIERA
• Paul Skenes at Mets – 29.5% K, 5.7% BB, 1.97 ERA, 3.10 SIERA
• Garrett Crochet at Reds – 31.3% K, 5.7% BB, 2.59 ERA, 2.86 SIERA
• Cristopher Sanchez vs. Rangers – 26.3% K, 5.5% BB, 2.50 ERA, 3.02 SIERA
• Hunter Brown vs. Angels – 28.3% K, 7.8% BB, 2.43 ERA, 3.39 SIERA
• Freddy Peralta vs. Pirates – 28.2% K, 9.1% BB, 2.70 ERA, 3.68 SIERA

I wouldn’t argue with anyone who says Tarik Skubal is the best pitcher in baseball, either in real life or DFS. He’s had three straight seasons over 30% strikeouts and below 5% walks, all three with ERAs below 2.80 and SIERAs below 2.90. That’s just remarkably fantastical pitching. He is the most-expensive pitcher on both sites, as he should be. He threw 73 pitches in his last Spring Training start, so he’s as stretched out as he needs to be to get plenty of leash to pay off the salary. He’s got a weird matchup with a Padres team that doesn’t look super imposing, but they were also the lowest-strikeout team in the league against LHP last season. My initial thought is I’d call him the SP1 if salary doesn’t matter, but because of the Padres’ low strikeouts and the likely somewhat capped pitch count, he probably won’t make it into my first lineup.

Through 55 career starts, Paul Skenes looks something like the best pitcher of all time who also happens to have a mustache that can take on personalities of its own. For all his awesomeness – and he is awesome – there is still at least some chance, if not a fairly good chance, that he’s been lucky so far. Now, don’t take that the wrong way; even with no ‘luck,’ the guy is fantastic, but he’s more just in the group of aces rather than on the top of it. This is one of the tougher matchups for the Opening Day aces, and as the pitcher with the 2nd-highest salary on DK (3rd highest on FD), I’m not going to have him in my narrowed-down pool in this first start.

Garrett Crochet was 2nd to only Skubal among qualified pitchers in K-BB% in 2025. If you flip the ‘luck’ factors between him and Skenes, I’d say Crochet is better, at least for DFS. I’d also say Crochet probably has a longer Opening Day leash after throwing 89 pitches in his last Spring Training start, and I also prefer his matchup with Cincinnati. With springtime weather in this great hitters ballpark, there is power risk here, but if he strikes everyone out, it doesn’t matter. I’d play Skubal ahead of him on FD with just a $200 gap, but on DK, give me Crochet as the upside SP1 for $9,700.

Last season, we were able to kind of sneak Cristopher Sanchez in under the radar as an underappreciated ace. I don’t think anyone will be fooled this season, but he still has just the 6th-highest salary at pitcher. His strikeouts are a skosh below the other aces, but he makes up for that with a 58% ground-ball rate that gives him a skill none of these other top-tier pitchers can match. Texas should be a good matchup for LHP this season, but I am just slightly less optimistic about Sanchez’ Opening Day pitch count as I am for some of these other aces. While we saw most aces up to 70-80 pitches (or more) in their last Spring Training start, Sanchez stopped at 50. He did throw 63 pitches on March 13th in the WBC, but that still leaves him a bit shy of the best-case scenario of these other top-tier aces, even though I like him just as much on a per-inning basis. I think he’s priced right where he should be, which puts him in the pool but not at the top of it.

Now we get to the tricky part: Hunter Brown and Freddy Peralta. At least based on SIERA, these two are not quite as elite as the other aces, but they are both pitchers who had a 28% strikeout rate last season, and more importantly, they have the best matchups of this top group. The Angels struck out at the highest rate of any team in the league last season, and I’d expect them to be back up there again this season. The Pirates, well, they are the Pirates.

Hunter Brown is one of the more stretched-out aces, at 83 pitches in his last Spring Training start, and with the matchup added in, it looks about right to have him as the pitcher with the 4th-highest salary. The Angels are filled with high-strikeout batters, and Brown’s ability to keep the ball on the ground helps offset the power in their lineup. For me, he’s the SP3, just behind Skubal and Crochet.

Freddy Peralta came to life in the second half of 2025, with a 32.2% K rate, but he was still having his usual control and home-run issues that may just never go away. There is also a little bit more mystery about a pitch count for his first start, though I’m hoping we get more insight before Thursday. He topped out at 56 pitches in his last Spring Training start, but that was on March 14th, and he threw some type of simulated game since then, but I haven’t heard anything about the pitch count. Even if we assume he is at the same workload as everyone, I prefer Brown ahead of him, but it’s very close. A Brown/Peralta pairing looks like a great starting point if you can’t quite get up to Skubal or Crochet.

ACES ON ANY OTHER DAY

• Jacob Misiorowski vs. White Sox – 31.9% K, 11.4% BB, 4.36 ERA, 3.56 SIERA
• Joe Ryan at Orioles – 28.2% K, 5.7% BB, 3.42 ERA, 3.32 SIERA
• Nathan Eovaldi at Phillies – 26% K, 4.2% BB, 1.73 ERA, 3.17 SIERA
• Nick Pivetta vs. Tigers – 26.4% K, 6.9% BB, 2.87 ERA, 3.69 SIERA

Want to read more? Sign up for MLB Premium!

-

-

-