Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Tuesday, April 23rd
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 Tuesday! Another day, another lack of offense without a single team over 7 runs. I’m going to say this again in the hitting section, but at this point, I am not overly concerned that we are in some new dead-ball era. I think we’ve had a slow April for bats with a lot of cold weather, and I expect to see the offense perk up as the weather warms up. However, I’m certainly open to the possibility that something else is going on, and we’ll keep an eye on it as we move forward. But at this moment, I’m not making any big changes.
We’ve got a nice looking 10-game slate with a bit of everything. We will end up with some chalk on the pitching side, but it should be a slate where the Coors Field game doesn’t jump out or skew ownership on the hitting side of things. Let’s dive on in and see what we find.
Tuesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
Let me start by saying that I couldn’t remember for certain what to call a group of seven, and when I asked my friend Google about it, the first thing he told me is that The Group of Seven, once known as the Algonquin School, was a group of Canadian landscape painters from 1920 to 1933. Yeah Google, that’s what I was asking! Since one of these seven top pitchers is a Blue Jay, we’re just going with that for today, so without further ado, here’s your top seven:
THE ALGONQUIN SCHOOL
Pablo Lopez vs. White Sox – 28.9% K, 5.8% BB, 3.70 ERA, 3.35 SIERA
Logan Webb vs. Mets – 22.2% K, 3.8% BB, 3.21 ERA, 3.18 SIERA
Marcus Stroman vs. A’s – 20.7% K, 9.2% BB, 3.74 ERA, 4.18 SIERA
Max Fried vs. Marlins – 23.5% K, 6.9% BB, 3.45 ERA, 3.60 SIERA
Logan Gilbert at Rangers – 25.1% K, 4.6% BB, 3.56 ERA, 3.67 SIERA
Kevin Gausman at Royals – 30.4% K, 7.2% BB, 3.52 ERA, 3.37 SIERA
Grayson Rodriguez at Angels – 25.5% K, 8.2% BB, 4.07 ERA, 3.92 SIERA
To me, finding the SP1 looks incredibly simple, and I would expect both projections and ownership to agree. If we take just the longer-term stats, Pablo Lopez and Kevin Gausman stand out as the best strikeout pitchers. Among those two, it turns out one of them is facing the White Sox. Sometimes, it’s just that simple. The White Sox are truly the worst, and at this rate, they could go down as one of the worst teams in the modern era. Lopez hasn’t been quite as dominant so far this season, but he’s still at a 25.8% K rate with just 4.5% walks, and he has 7 strikeouts in 3 of his 4 starts. He weakness is against lefties, and the White Sox have one moderate lefty power threat in the lineup. Lopez is the SP1 tonight. If you want to fade him based on ownership, of course, that’s always viable, but I’ll be playing him and looking to get different elsewhere.
Finding the SP2 is much trickier, as I would say that the next best pitcher is Logan Gilbert, but he and Kevin Gausman are the only two tough matchups in this tier. Against Texas at his salary, all I can say is that Gilbert is a deep MME dart throw. Gausman has looked a bit better, and I think we’re going to see something close to his old self moving forward. The matchup is not so tough as to take him off the board, but it does put him a full tier below Lopez for me. Let’s move on at look at the next few guys before deciding where Gausman fits.
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