Million Dollar Musings: Tuesday, July 18
CheeseIsGood, a two-time winner of a $1,000,000 first-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.
Happy Tuesday! We have a big 14-game slate that brings a huge tangled mess of pretty good pitchers. My initial run-through has 20 pitchers as viable and exactly zero of them as standouts. Yippee! With all those pretty good pitchers, we are left with a huge tangle of OK, but not great, offense. Other than Houston visiting Coors Field, we are left without much clarity on either side of the ledger.
I’ll do my best to sort through this tangle of MLB DFS picks, but this is going to be one of those spread-it-out slates where your list may end up looking completely different from mine.
Tuesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
As I alluded to in the intro, this slate is a huge mess on the pitching side. We don’t have a single can’t-miss ace, but we also have a ton of pretty good pitchers. I have 19 listed here, but you can find even more than this that all fit in basically the same bucket. Here is the bird’s-eye view without any dividing lines:
Joe Musgrove at Blue Jays – 24.2% K, 5.2% BB, 3.29 ERA, 3.76 SIERA
Taj Bradley at Rangers – 29.7% K, 7.1% BB, 5.43 ERA, 3.44 SIERA
Nathan Eovaldi vs. Rays – 24% K, 6.8% BB, 2.83 ERA, 3.83 SIERA
Mitch Keller vs. Guardians – 26.7% K, 7% BB, 3.31 ERA, 3.67 SIERA
Tyler Wells vs. Dodgers – 25.4% K, 5.9% BB, 3.18 ERA, 3.98 SIERA
Logan Allen at Pirates – 22.9% K, 8.7% BB, 3.47 ERA, 4.32 SIERA
Hunter Brown at Rockies – 28.1% K, 8.4% BB, 4.12 ERA, 3.43 SIERA
Bailey Ober at Mariners – 24.6% K, 5.6% BB, 2.61 ERA, 4.02 SIERA
Domingo German at Angels – 24.6% K, 7.5% BB, 4.32 ERA, 4.04 SIERA
Bryan Woo vs. Twins – 30.5% K, 6.4% BB, 3.63 ERA, 3.27 SIERA
Jordan Montgomery vs. Marlins – 22.3% K, 6.3% BB, 3.23 ERA, 4.05 SIERA
Alek Manoah vs. Padres – 18.4% K, 13.8% BB, 5.91 ERA, 5.63 SIERA
Bryce Elder vs. Diamondbacks – 18.4% K, 7.8% BB, 2.97 ERA, 4.41 SIERA
Lucas Giolito at Mets – 25.3% K, 7.4% BB, 3.45 ERA, 4.02 SIERA
Tarik Skubal at Royals
Patrick Sandoval vs. Yankees – 18.2% K, 9.4% BB, 4.41 ERA, 4.78 SIERA
Jameson Taillon vs. Nationals – 20.3% K, 7.1% BB, 6.15 ERA, 4.57 SIERA
Carlos Carrasco vs. White Sox – 16.2% K, 10.2% BB, 5.16 ERA, 5.23 SIERA
Daniel Lynch vs. Tigers – 15.5% K, 7% BB, 4.18 ERA, 5.15 SIERA
This is just a mess. There is so little separating all these pitchers, that any sort of line I try to draw is going to be extremely arbitrary. I am not going to attempt to fully talk through all these different pitchers. So I’m going to make some quick cuts from the primary pool and then pull out a few ‘favorites’, while keeping in mind that I really have no favorites here.
Before we get to that, there are a few situations that require some extra digging:
Taj Bradley is the second-highest strikeout pitcher on this slate, but there are some real concerns here. His last three starts have been disastrous, with just a 9:4 K:BB ratio and 16 runs allowed in 12 innings. Even when he was at the top of his game, he never had the type of leash we see from other top starters, only having hit 90 pitches twice in 13 starts. Against an offense like the Rangers, I have very little interest in chasing his upside on a slate with this many options at lower salaries.
Alek Manoah looked like a completely different pitcher after his return from the minors, striking out 8 Tigers with no walks in 6 strong innings before the break. The start to his season was so bad, that he has a long road back to regain our trust, but there is at least some chance that he got it figured out and can get back to the solid starter he was in 2022. If we had a bad pitching slate, or if Manoah had an easy matchup, I’d be willing to take the shot and jump on board here. But as it is, even if we give him his 2022 stats, he doesn’t really jump out, so he misses the primary cut for me.
Tarik Skubal is making just his third start of the season, and if I’d put his 8 IP numbers on the list above, he would look like the clear SP1 on this slate. But he has thrown just 4 innings in each of his first two starts, topping out at 63 pitches. I do not expect a huge increase here, although perhaps we can see him get up to 5 innings and maybe something in the 75-pitch range. Mixing in his past skills, how good he’s looked so far, and the matchup with the Royals, I am leaving Skubal in my primary pool even with the limited ceiling.
OK, now let’s back to figuring out who else we can separate.
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