Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Tuesday, May 21st
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! We have just an 8-game slate tonight, which has some danger of turning into a 7-game slate with the weather in the BAL/STL game. Kevin Roth has that as Orange to start the day on our MLB Weather page, so while I’ll include it in the write-up, be sure to keep an eye on the afternoon weather report before making firm plans with Orioles and Cardinals.
Even if we were to lose that game, there is a ton of high-upside offense to love on this slate, which is leading to some weird cheap chalk on the pitching side. Let’s dive in and see what we find.
Tuesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
This is not a great pitching slate, but with that, we’re not being asked to pay all that much for it either. Once we get down to the hitter section, we’re going to find a lot of fantastic spend-up options, which is further downgrading my thoughts on these top-tier pitchers.
TOP-TIER PITCHING
Garrett Crochet at Blue Jays – 33.7% K, 5.8% BB, 4.18 ERA, 2.52 SIERA
Yusei Kikuchi vs. White Sox – 26.3% K, 4.8% BB, 2.60 ERA, 3.14 SIERA
Kyle Bradish at Cardinals – 27.9% K, 9.8% BB, 2.63 ERA, 3.38 SIERA
Cristian Javier vs. Angels – 20.2% K, 12.4% BB, 3.23 ERA, 5.10 SIERA
Bryan Woo at Yankees – 3rd start of season
Clarke Schmidt vs. Mariners – 27% K, 7.4% BB, 2.49 ERA, 3.39 SIERA
Charlie Morton at Cubs – 23.7% K, 9.1% BB, 3.52 ERA, 3.87 SIERA
Outside of that little 3-game stretch in April when he allowed a bunch of runs, Garrett Crochet has looked like an absolute superstar. He has far and away the highest strikeout rate on this slate, and matchup hasn’t mattered all that much. It’s a strange matchup, with Toronto being a very low-strikeout team against LHP but also just not very good. We’re not being asked to spend all that much for him at $9,500 on DK. There is still some question about his workload, but he is usually around 90 pitches and should be able to get 6 innings when things go his way. I end up with three pitchers in a virtual tie for the top spot, and my initial hunch is that Crochet will be the lowest owned of those three. With that, I will call him my SP1, but it’s not with much conviction. It’s really more about the lack of other good options than it is about loving Crochet. When in doubt, just play the guy with the 33.7% K rate. I want to be extra clear here that this is not as strong of an SP1 / highest-salary-on-the-slate pitcher as we typically see, and while I’m calling him my top pitcher, this is not a priority spend.
If Crochet isn’t the SP1, then it’s…
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