Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Thursday, July 25th
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’ve got another very early start, with the main slate being a 6-gamer at 12:05 PM ET. Unless you live on the East Coast, that makes it too early for lunch, so maybe we can have some brunch or something while this slate gets going. I don’t really understand brunch. I prefer to just say I’m eating lunch early, but hey, you do whatever you need to do to have some food ready when Dylan Cease and Corbin Burnes take the mound.
If you’re playing the late 2-game slate, we will have some Expert tags in our MLB lineup optimizer, LineupHQ, to get you pointed in the right direction.
Editor’s Note: Looking for more places to play? Check out our PrizePicks promo code and Underdog Fantasy promo code, two of the best DFS apps available today.
Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
This is a very good group of pitchers for such a small slate, even before accounting for the return of the great Clayton Kershaw. There are sort of two top tiers if we split things up by salary, but because of the small slate size and the way the priorities are mixed up, I’m going to list the top 8 pitchers all in one bucket:
TOP TIER PITCHING
Dylan Cease at Nationals – 32.5% K, 7.6% BB, 3.76 ERA, 3.01 SIERA
Corbin Burnes at Marlins – 23.4% K, 5.8% BB, 2.38 ERA, 3.59 SIERA
Taj Bradley at Blue Jays – 29.8% K, 8.6% BB, 2.63 ERA, 3.35 SIERA
Max Scherzer vs. White Sox – 20% K, 5% BB, 3.99 ERA, 4.22 SIERA
Chris Bassitt vs. Rays – 21.3% K, 9.3% BB, 3.71 ERA, 4.33 SIERA
Logan Webb at Dodgers – 20.7% K, 6% BB, 3.59 ERA, 3.50 SIERA
Clayton Kershaw vs. Giants – season debut
Gavin Williams vs. Tigers – 16.9% K, 9.6% BB, 4.50 ERA, 4.96 SIERA
This is a fantastically interesting slate. We have two of the best pitchers of our generation with Max Scherzer and Clayton Kershaw, but they are both on the tail ends of their career, and nowhere near what they used to be.
The first thing I’m going to say is that as thrilled as I am to see Clayton Kershaw back in our lives, I have no interest in him for DFS purposes today. This is not anything like the Glasnow situation from last night, where we’re just guessing at a pitch count after a 3-week absence. This is a 36-year-old coming back from a 9-month shoulder injury. He topped out at 67 pitches and 4 innings in his rehab starts. I still expect him to be an elite pitcher right out of the gate, but he’s not one of the top strikeout pitchers on this slate to make up for a low pitch count ceiling. I’m rooting for him, but it won’t be on my rosters.
Max Scherzer is far trickier, as he gets the golden matchup against the White Sox and is 6 starts into his season. The issue here is that…
Want to read more? Sign up for Premium!
