Million Dollar Musings: Tuesday, June 6
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 tricky 12-game slate on tap tonight with some high-end aces, a lack of cheap pitching, and a loaded top tier of offense that you’ll want to spend on. We’re back at Coors Field with the Giants visiting the Rockies. But we’ve also got the Dodgers traveling to Cincinnati, giving us two teams that start the day with team totals above 6 and another five teams above 5.
We won’t be able to get high-end pitching with the best bats in those top stacks in the same lineup, so choices will have to be made. I’ll give you a glimpse into the future and tell you right from the start that I am on the side of spending up for pitching and then figuring out how to make it work with the bats.
With that, let’s jump on in and look through the MLB DFS picks available for this big Tuesday night slate.
Tuesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
We’ve got a lot of pretty good pitchers on this slate, however, it’s also going to be quite simple to cross many of them off the primary list rather quickly. I’ll start with these two main buckets, separated by strikeout rate, and then later we’ll see if we can find any punts worth throwing darts at.
ACES
Mitch Keller vs. A’s – 30.4% K, 5.6% BB, 3.25 ERA, 3.10 SIERA
Kevin Gausman vs. Astros – 32.9% K, 5.9% BB, 2.76 ERA, 2.91 SIERA
Hunter Brown at Blue Jays – 28.8% K, 7.8% BB, 3.61 ERA, 3.28 SIERA
James Paxton at Guardians – 33.8% K, 8.8% BB, 4.26 ERA, 3.35 SIERA [4 starts]
Logan Gilbert at Padres – 28.7% K, 4.3% BB, 4.08 ERA, 3.20 SIERA
GOOD PITCHERS
Shane Bieber vs. Red Sox – 16.9% K, 6.7% BB, 3.72 ERA, 4.66 SIERA
Freddy Peralta vs. Orioles – 23% K, 9.4% BB, 4.62 ERA, 4.40 SIERA
Joe Musgrove vs. Mariners – 21.3% K, 7.5% BB, 4.71 ERA, 4.37 SIERA
Bryce Elder vs. Mets – 21.1% K, 7.2% BB, 1.92 ERA, 3.85 SIERA
Tony Gonsolin at Reds – 17.7% K, 9.2% BB, 1.77 ERA, 5.07 SIERA
Clarke Schmidt vs. White Sox – 26% K, 7.6% BB, 5.01 ERA, 3.79 SIERA
Lucas Giolito at Yankees – 23.9% K, 7.3% BB, 4.08 ERA, 4.15 SIERA
MITCH, KEVIN, AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE
I love Hunter Brown; I think he’s fantastic. I very much like Logan Gilbert; I think he’s great. I have long been a fan of James Paxton, and I think he’s still good.
But with all that being said, Mitch Keller and Kevin Gausman are better than everyone else here. The matchup is not ideal for Gausman, but it’s still plenty good for a guy with a 33% K rate and just 3.4% walks against righties. He’s also over 30% strikeouts to lefties, and if he can just survive BABIP and Alvarez/Tucker, there’s no reason he can’t keep piling up strikeouts here. He has double-digit strikeouts in five of his 12 starts and 7+ strikeouts in nine of them. He’s had a couple hiccups, but the pitch count more than makes up for that, going over 100 pitches in four consecutive starts.
Meanwhile, Mitch Keller has allowed a few runs in his last couple starts, but the strikeouts keep soaring, along with a trustable pitch count and a great matchup tonight. Keller has at least 8 strikeouts in each of his last seven starts (63 total strikeouts), along with just 6 total walks in that same span. That is just incredible stuff, and he’d be right there with Gausman as the SP 1-A if they had the same matchups. Given that Keller has the far superior matchup, he is my SP1, and Gausman is the pivot or ideal SP2 if you can manage to double spend-up on DK.
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