Million Dollar Musings: Tuesday, May 16
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’ve got a big old 12-game slate, with a bunch of good pitching and some concentrated chalk on the hitting side. Even with a dozen or more great arms on the mound, it still looks likely that we see some chalk there, and all of this leads to a fairly obvious type of build. In tournaments, my initial lean is that I am not going to try and get cute on both sides of the ledger. I’ll be willing to eat the chalk on either the hitting or pitching side but just looking for ways not to play them together.
With that, let’s jump into this Tuesday night slate and see what MLB DFS picks we can find in Coors Field and beyond.
Tuesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
The top six pitchers on this slate are all aces with strong skill sets and track records. Here is what the group looks like with 2023 stats:
Clayton Kershaw vs. Twins – 29% K, 5.2% BB, 2.36 ERA, 3.23 SIERA
Justin Verlander vs. Rays – 27.3% K, 6.8% BB, 2.25 ERA, 4.09 SIERA
Kevin Gausman vs. Yankees – 34.2% K, 3.6% BB, 3.38 ERA, 2.56 SIERA
Cristian Javier vs. Cubs – 29% K, 5.4% BB, 3.47 ERA, 3.43 SIERA
Zack Wheeler at Giants – 27.9% K, 6.3% BB, 3.80 ERA, 3.49 SIERA
Luis Castillo at Red Sox – 28.1% K, 4.9% BB, 2.70 ERA, 3.32 SIERA
It is remarkable how similar all these pitchers are in skill set so far this season. The only one who stands out a little is Kevin Gausman, but he’s shown enough inconsistency to remain in the thick of this clump and not on top of it.
The first thing I’m going to say is that all six of these aces are in my pool tonight. And not even just the 150-MME dart throw pool. I will consider every one of these guys in my first 5-10 lineups. But still, we’ve got to get some sort of ranking to prioritize them.
To do that, we’ll start looking at the matchups, and that will move Luis Castillo down to the bottom of the group. The Red Sox don’t strike out, plus it’s likely that Castillo sees seven lefties, where his strikeouts drop back to the 25% range.
