Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Opening Day Thursday 3/27

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-03-30 20:56:42 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. 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 upcoming MLB DFS slate.

Happy Baseball Season!! We have made it through the long winter, and I’m thrilled to be back for another season musing about all things MLB DFS with you here at RotoGrinders. If you’ve been with me in the past, things will be mostly the same here each and every day. I’ll be writing an article breaking down the main slate most every weekday, while Saturdays and Sundays (after tax season) will be covered by Justin Van Zuiden, aka STLCardinals84.

While I am still going to tell you my favorite MLB DFS picks for each given slate, the goal here is never to just give you plays or try to predict an unpredictable sport like baseball. The goal is to show you the thought process that goes into building lineups and walk through which stats and trends I’m using to build my player pool. Most days, we will start with a breakdown of pitchers, narrowing down to the world famous Cliff Notes where you’ll be able to see my favorite options for that day. Then we’ll move on to hitters, where I’ll sort the stacks into tiers and pull out some favorite individual spend-ups and salary savers. In the Cliff Notes, I’ll give a nice tidy ranking of my favorites for the day.

I will be slowly adding some new metrics into my daily analysis, leaning a bit more on Statcast data for things like hard hit %, barrels, and exit velocity. I’ve also been keeping a close eye on some newer tools like Stuff+ for pitchers, which I may start to incorporate into the Musings as the season rolls along.

In addition, if you’re new to the Musings, I apologize in advance for the dad jokes and nonsense, but really, that is a core part of the ‘charm’ of this article. Charm is subjective, and you are welcome to use a very different term if it suits you!

Before we dive in to the Opening Day slate and wait for the lineups to start rolling in on our MLB starting lineups page, let’s start here:

There is no point in the season when we will know less than we know right now. For now, all we can do is use the data from previous seasons, which just assumes that everyone is going to be the exact same player they were in the past and assumes that every player is in mid-season form. In reality, even if we dig into every Spring Training pitch and at-bat, we have no idea who is in mid-season form, who is behind schedule, and who is going to be a completely different player this season.

I say all that to say this – while I’m going to do the usual walkthrough of my favorite players for Opening Day and who is most likely to do well based on previous data, this is the time to just ignore all the data and play for randomness to take over. In terms of actual DFS play for me, this simply means that I will be even more intent on spreading out my player exposures than I will be later in the season. While it’s always viable to just fade the plays projecting for the highest ownership due to the nature of the sport, it is even more viable when we add in the uncertainty of the start of a new season.

So, with that, I’m going to tell you what looks like the best plays, and then we can all go and do something completely different! YIPPEEEE!

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Opening Day Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

Well folks, we made it exactly zero days into the new season before we run into different main slates for DK and FD. FD is starting an hour earlier than DK and adding in 2 extra games. Fortunately, these games don’t end up making a huge impact on the pitching side, but we will take a quick look at the 4 extra FD options.

One of the tricks of early-season baseball is trying to determine how long of a leash pitchers are going to have in their first few starts. While we can try to read into Spring Training pitch counts, unless we have any clear news from the teams, it’s all guesswork how many pitches anyone will be allowed to throw out of the gate. Unless we have a reason to expect otherwise, I am going in assuming that everyone is ready to go something like 90% of a regular mid-season workload. We’re less likely to see anyone getting 100+ pitches, but for the most part, ace pitchers are generally not all that limited in opening starts. Just to give a few real-world examples, if we look back to Opening Day 2024, these are some innings and pitches from some of the aces:

Cole Ragans – 6 IP, 97 pitches
Garrett Crochet – 6 IP, 87 pitches
Pablo Lopez – 7 IP, 84 pitches
Tarik Skubal – 6 IP, 83 pitches
Corbin Burnes – 6 IP, 82 pitches
Tyler Glasnow – 6 IP, 81 pitches

As you can see, other than the outlier 97 from Ragans, maybe some of those other guys would have gotten to 7 innings and 90 pitches in mid-season, but we saw a steady 6 innings from most everyone, so these are not concerning pitch-count issues.

With that in mind, I am not shying away from spending up for pitching due to workload concerns. Now, let’s take a look at what we have on tap for Opening Day. The stats listed here are the 2024 numbers.

A BOATLOAD OF OPENING DAY ACES

• Paul Skenes at Marlins – 33.1% K, 6.2% BB, 1.96 ERA, 2.71 SIERA
• Chris Sale at Padres – 32.1% K, 5.6% BB, 2.38 ERA, 2.80 SIERA
• Cole Ragans vs. Guardians – 29.3% K, 8.8% BB, 3.14 ERA, 3.49 SIERA
• Zack Wheeler at Nationals – 28.5% K, 6.6% BB, 2.57 ERA, 3.32 SIERA
• Garrett Crochet at Rangers – 35.1% K, 5.5% BB, 3.58 ERA, 2.53 SIERA
• Tanner Bibee at Royals – 26.3% K, 6.2% BB, 3.47 ERA, 3.58 SIERA
• Hunter Greene vs. Giants – 27.7% K, 9.3% BB, 2.75 ERA, 3.80 SIERA
• Pablo Lopez at Cardinals – 25.6% K, 5.3% BB, 4.08 ERA, 3.46 SIERA
• Sonny Gray vs. Twins – 30.3% K, 5.8% BB, 3.86 ERA, 3.03 SIERA
• Michael King vs. Braves – 27.7% K, 8.7% BB, 2.95 ERA, 3.63 SIERA
• Nathan Eovaldi vs. Red Sox – 23.9% K, 6% BB, 3.80 ERA, 3.64 SIERA
• Logan Webb at Reds – 20.5% K, 5.9% B, 3.47 ERA, 3.61 SIERA
• Framber Valdez vs. Mets – 24% K, 7.8% BB, 2.91 ERA, 3.41 SIERA
• Yusei Kikuchi at White Sox – 28% K, 6% BB, 4.05 ERA, 3.30 SIERA
• Sandy Alcantara vs. Pirates – (2023 stats) – 19.8% K, 6.3% BB, 4.14 ERA, 4.24 SIERA

FD-Only Pitchers

• Freddy Peralta at Yankees – 27.6% K, 9.4% BB, 3.68 ERA, 3.78 SIERA
• Carlos Rodon vs. Brewers – 26.5% K, 7.7% BB, 3.96 ERA, 3.78 SIERA
• Jose Berrios vs. Orioles – 19.5% K, 6.9% BB, 3.60 ERA, 4.33 SIERA
• Zach Eflin at Blue Jays – 19.6% K, 3.5% BB, 3.59 ERA , 3.97 SIERA

The real simple truth of this slate is that we have a tremendous number of elite pitchers, and there is no great way to separate them. Any one of these guys is capable of posting a big start at any time, whether it’s the 1st start of the season or the 10th start of the season. It would be perfectly reasonable to include every single one of these guys in an MME pool, but let’s try and narrow things down a bit.

Before considering salary or any early-season workload concerns, just glancing at the skill sets and matchups, I would put Paul Skenes, Garrett Crochet, and Zack Wheeler at the top of the list, followed very closely by Chris Sale, Cole Ragans, Yusei Kikuchi, and Sonny Gray, with that group followed closely by Pablo Lopez, Michael King, Hunter Greene, Tanner Bibee, Sandy Alcantara, Framber Valdez, Nathan Eovaldi, Logan Webb, Carlos Rodon, and Freddy Peralta.

You could rearrange my groupings any way you want, and I would certainly not yell at you. I’m hoping to make it an entire season without yelling at you, but that doesn’t seem likely!

I’m going to start making cuts by leaving Webb, Zach Eflin, and Jose Berrios out of my primary pool due to their lower strikeout rates, combined with matchups. Valdez, Bibee, and Eovaldi are not off the list but are moved down a tad with their strikeout ability being at least a tick behind the other aces.

I am also not including Alcantara in my initial pool, though I’m a bit torn on that. I like his long-term talent and matchup, but I don’t love jumping in on Opening Day with a guy who hasn’t pitched since 2023 and already has whispers of a limited workload this season. Most likely, Alcantara’s Opening Day pitch count ends up similar to everyone else here, and I wouldn’t argue with you if you had him in the same range as guys like Lopez and Bibee.

I will also say that while I have Gray on the main list, I’m a bit wary of him as well after lower velocity in Spring Training and perhaps a lingering illness, so I’ve moved him down further than I otherwise would. It’s quite possible that I’m reading tea leaves that don’t exist, and if he turns out to be at 100% out of the gate, he would be in my top 5.

Just to be clear, all of the names I just mentioned as missing my primary pool are completely playable — I just don’t want to have 20 pitchers in my pool, as that makes for unsafe swimming conditions.

Again, without worrying about salary yet, if I had no salary cap, my primary pool would consist of Skenes, Crochet, and Wheeler, with Sale, Kikuchi, and Ragans coming into my first 20 or so lineups, and then the next group filtering into MME.

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