Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks for Tuesday, September 10th
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 kind of weird looking 11-game slate on tap. There are a ton of good pitchers on the mound, but most of them are in tougher matchups. This also leads to having a lot of the top offenses in less-than-ideal matchups, which leaves us with a lot of ways to spend up to be contrarian. I’m landing on a fairly small pool of both pitching and hitting, but you could easily go the other way.
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Tuesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
This is an interesting pitching slate where we have a whole slew of good pitchers, but mostly in very tough matchups. I’ll start by listing 10 top-tier pitchers who are all above $8,000 on DK, but I will then quickly cross most of them off the board.
TOP TIER PITCHING
Shota Imanaga at Dodgers – 25.2% K, 4.1% BB, 2.99 ERA, 3.54 SIERA
Pablo Lopez vs. Angels – 26% K, 5.1% BB, 4.05 ERA, 3.40 SIERA
Zac Gallen vs. Rangers – 23.6% K, 8.8% BB, 3.69 ERA, 4.03 SIERA
Yoshinobu Yamamoto vs. Cubs – 1st start off IL
Nathan Eovaldi at Diamondbacks – 24.3% K, 5.9% BB, 3.55 ERA, 3.56 SIERA
George Kirby vs. Padres – 23.5% K, 3% BB, 3.61 ERA, 3.54 SIERA
Spencer Arrighetti vs. A’s – 27.5% K, 10.9% BB, 4.82 ERA, 4.00 SIERA
Chris Bassitt vs. Mets – 22.7% K, 8.6% BB, 4.30 ERA, 4.19 SIERA
Yu Darvish at Mariners – 23.5% K, 7% BB, 3.51 ERA, 3.96 SIERA
David Peterson at Blue Jays – 19.5% K, 9.6% BB, 2.75 ERA, 4.45 SIERA
This is a lot of good pitchers, and yet I have almost no interest in playing any of them on this slate. This is definitely a slate where you can make a case to play these good pitchers in tougher matchups at low ownership, but I’m just going with the narrowed-down approach. I’ll start by talking briefly about everything missing the cut.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto hasn’t pitched since June and threw just 53 pitches in his last rehab start. He’s an easy pass at this salary with a limited pitch count.
Next, we have this trio of similarly skilled pitchers – Shota Imanaga, George Kirby, Nathan Eovaldi. These guys are all very good real-life pitchers, but they are also more about control than strikeouts. They have also all shown plenty of upside, although, more often than not, their upside starts are in better matchups. Every one of these three can throw a gem in any matchup, and I am by no means saying they are unplayable. But when I compare them to other options on the board, I have very little interest in playing them against the Dodgers, Diamondbacks, and Padres.
Pablo Lopez is basically the same pitcher as Imanaga, Kirby, and Eovaldi. He is also up and down with the strikeouts and generally more matchup-dependent for upside. He gets a massively better matchup than those three with an Angels team that has only two batters in the projected lineups with any semblance of contact ability. He is probably going to be the chalk, and if you wanted to take the stance that you are fading the one chalk pitcher to play similarly skilled pitchers in his place, I understand. I’ll be playing Lopez. He is my SP1 on all sites in all formats.
Zac Gallen has been a little better recently, bringing the strikeouts back up to his usual level, but the control has been very shaky. He has multiple walks in 6 straight starts and a horrific 11.9% BB rate since the All-Star Break. The matchup is not good enough to get him into my primary pool, and he’s merely an MME leftover.
Chris Bassitt was going to be a top option on last night’s slate, but tonight he falls back down into the abyss. The one thing that could save him would be if we get 6+ righties against him, which is possible. He’s good enough against righties that I would push him ahead of Gallen and the Imanaga, Kirby, and Eovaldi trio in that scenario.
Just when I’m ready to give up on…
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