Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Thursday, September 12th
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 Thursday! We have a weird little 5-game slate with a whole bunch of OK but not great pitchers. This is leading to a tangled mess on both sides of the ledger. I’ll pick out a few favorites, but this is going to be a spread-it-out kind of slate. Be sure to note that the slate starts a few minutes earlier than normal, at 6:45 p.m. ET.
The early 3-game slate has much more exciting pitching options up top, and we’ll have some Expert Tags in our MLB lineup optimizer, LineupHQ, to help get you started there.
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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
This is not a great pitching slate, but that also leaves just about everyone as a viable option. I’ll sort things into these two tiers based on DK pricing. I also want to point out that the Rangers are calling up their top prospect Kumar Rocker. As of now, he is not in the player pool, but if he gets added at a reasonable salary, he would be in consideration. They are going to be very cautious with his pitch count, likely in the 70-75 range, but this is a kid with silly elite strikeout ability. If he came in around $7,000 or less on DK, he’d be in my primary pool.
Editor’s note: Rocker costs $8,500 on DK.
TOP TIER PITCHING
Bryce Miller vs. Rangers – 23.8% K, 6% BB, 3.18 ERA, 3.84 SIERA
Nestor Cortes vs. Red Sox – 22.1% K, 5% BB, 3.97 ERA, 4.08 SIERA
Ryan Pepiot at Guardians – 25.3% K, 8.6% BB, 3.66 ERA, 3.97 SIERA
Frankie Montas at Giants – 20.9% K, 9.9% BB, 4.69 ERA, 4.56 SIERA
Gavin Williams vs. Rays – 24.2% K, 9.8% BB, 5.25 ERA, 4.18 SIERA
This is not a super exciting group of pitchers, but we’re all playing with the same slate.
I guess I’m going to say that Bryce Miller is my SP1 here is salary doesn’t matter, but his strikeouts have been very up and down with more downs than ups. He’s closer to an ace against righties with a 26% K rate and 3.8% walks, and the Rangers have a glaring lack of good left-handed hitters right now. Adding in his good home ballpark with the lack of power for Texas, I’ll start with Miller, but this is not some sort of must-play.
Nestor Cortes is the first of several wild card options with some upside and plenty of risk on this slate. Making matters even tougher to decipher, the Yankees have started messing around with his pitch count, using him as a piggyback starter last week, and now going just 4 innings in his last two outings. My hunch here is that as long as he pitches well, he has his full leash, but they also won’t be hesitant to cut this short if he gets into trouble. That leaves him in the risk/reward bucket against a Red Sox team with a lot of strikeouts against lefties but also plenty of power to cause him issues. Mostly because of the lack of options behind him, I’m calling him the SP2, and at just $8,000 on DK, it’s not all that hard to start with a Miller/Cortes pairing.
Ryan Pepiot has been just kind of OK, meandering through his last 5 starts with his strikeouts dropping to 20.9% and his innings coming and going with them. His matchup is far enough behind Miller and Cortes that he’s just an MME leftover for me at this salary.
Frankie Montas get a good matchup and a big ballpark boost in San Francisco. He’s also been about as good as any of these guys over the past couple of months, with a strikeout rate of up to 24% since the All-Star Break. We’ve seen a steady pitch count, giving him 6+ innings in four straight starts and plenty of strikeout upside in good matchups, including a 10-K performance in his last outing. I end up liking him almost as much as…
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