Million Dollar Musings: Opening Day MLB DFS Picks
CheeseIsGood, a two-time winner of a $1,000,000 1st-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.
We made it! I hope you all had a wonderful offseason and are as ready as I am to get back to the baseball grind. If you’ve read my Musings in the past, welcome back! If you’re new here, I am going to start by walking you through what to expect this season. We’ll get to some Opening Day analysis shortly, but I want to kick things off by getting you familiarized with the format and goals of the Musings.
Most frequently, I will be writing this MLB breakdown Monday through Friday, with our friend Justin Van Zuiden (stlcardinals84) handling the Saturday/Sunday analysis. There will be some times we swap things around, but you’ll always get a slate breakdown here from one of us.
MLB DFS Primer for FanDuel & DraftKings
While I’m always going to tell you my favorite plays of every slate, the main goal of these articles is not to just give you picks and pretend to be able to crystal-ball what is going to happen that day. Baseball is by far the most variant of any DFS sport, and unpredictable craziness is going to ensue. (I will also use words like ‘ensue’ and just assume that I know what they mean). More than just specific picks, I am trying to give you a bird’s-eye view of the slate and sort things out into a manageable and understandable starting point for building lineups.
I will talk about cash game and tournament considerations for both DraftKings and FanDuel but with a heavier emphasis towards tournament construction. We’ll start most days with pitching, sorting the pitchers into tiers and then narrowing the pool as much as possible. On the hitting side, I’ll most often group stacks into tiers, as well as look at individual players I am using in my lineups, both high-end options as well as salary savers for each site. At the end of each section, I will wrap a tidy bow around my thoughts for the slate in the world-famous Cliff Notes. If you only have a few minutes to read, or just don’t want to wade through all my nonsense, the Cliff Notes will get you headed in the right direction.
Beyond breaking down the slate and walking through my favorite plays, there are two real primary goals of this article:
1) To help you understand the statistics and factors that I personally use in my DFS analysis. You can get by with just using projections or rankings and analysis, but I want to help you understand why I’m looking at the plays I’m looking at. Some days I may do a deep dive on a particular pitcher, not so much because it changes that particular slate, but because it will show everything that I look at in determining how to value one player vs. another. You will quickly pick up on exactly what stats I value most highly from day to day and what makes me change my opinion on a player or what may give me a different opinion than projections have on that day.
2) To have a little fun in life. The DFS industry can get a little bit contentious at times, and a long, grindy season like baseball can get a little boring at times. Some days, I may just hammer through K%, wOBA and stacks, etc., while other days, we may take a little time to discuss why we don’t use the word hullabaloo more often. Which then brings up trying to determine the correct time to use hullabaloo instead of brouhaha. And then other days, I’ll just talk baseball and say something like: Tarik Skubal is my favorite pitcher tonight. And then Skubal will give up 6 runs in 3 innings, and guess what? A brouhaha will ensue in Discord and on TwittX!
Really and truly, if I only accomplish one thing with the Musings in 2024, I want you to enjoy the season. Of course, I want to help you win, I want to give you a better understanding of baseball analysis, but goodness gracious people, let’s enjoy ourselves a little.
As we get to the baseball analysis, I’m simply going to dive in headfirst and act like we are already in mid-season form. If you have not read any of my Musings in the past, I recommend that you take few minutes to read these two primer articles from a couple years ago. These will give you an overview of what stats I am going to cover most frequently, along with the why and how:
OK, with all that out of the way, let’s jump in and take a peek at the Opening Day slate. Please note that I am writing this on Sunday/Monday, so things might change before we get to Opening Day. At the time I’m writing, we don’t have lineups, weather updates, or possible pitch-count news that might show up throughout the week. I’ll post updates at the top of the page as needed on Wednesday and leading up to first pitch on Thursday. Let’s play ball!
Opening Day Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
The sites have thrown us a sizeable monkey wrench right out of the gate, with a 10-game slate on FD starting at 3:05 PM ET vs. an 8-game slate on DK starting at 4:10 PM ET. Two games may not seem like a huge deal, but those two games add three of the league’s best pitchers as well as one of the league’s best offenses into the mix.
As you would expect, we have a lot of aces pitching on Opening Day. For the first few weeks, we tend to get the good pitchers all on the same days, and then we’ll end up with some days filled with bottom-of-the-rotation scrubs a few days later.
The more great pitchers there are on a slate, the more you can make a case to just spread out and play a little bit of everybody. I’ll separate these guys as much as possible, but between all the talent and it being the first start of the season, there is not a lot of clarity here. We shouldn’t expect full mid-season workloads, but unless we have a clear word of a strict pitch count or innings limit, I am just going to assume that everyone is as ready to go for a full start as we can expect out of the gate and that we’ll see 5-6 innings and 90-ish pitches from the aces. I’m going to post the 2023 numbers for these pitchers, and while there will be changes, for this first start, all we have to go on is past data.
I’m going to start by briefly touching on the three FanDuel-only aces and then jump into the full pool for both sites.
FANDUEL-ONLY ACES
- Spencer Strider at Phillies – 36.8% K, 7.6% BB, 3.86 ERA, 2.86 SIERA
- Corbin Burnes vs. Angels – 25.5% K, 8.4% BB, 3.39 ERA, 4.02 SIERA
- Zack Wheeler vs. Braves – 26.9% K, 5% BB, 3.61 ERA, 3.53 SIERA
Even on an Opening Day slate filled with aces, Spencer Strider is in a tier of his own. His strikeout ability is unmatched, which makes his DFS upside unmatched. Last year, we saw 6 innings and 9 strikeouts in his first start of the season, and we also saw 9+ strikeouts in an incredible 22 starts last year. What I’ll say here is that because of the salary and all the other great arms on the slate, he’s not the type of must-play that he will be at other times. But I will also tell you that I will absolutely play him in any and every lineup where I have the salary available. He is in a pricing tier of his own at $11,000 on FD. Clicking Strider into your lineup leaves an even $3,000 per bat, which would lock you out of quite a few different top stacks and combinations of stud hitters. But if I’m going to use some of the cheap stacks, which I am, I will not overthink it with Strider.
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