Million Dollar Musings: Wednesday, April 19
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 Wednesday! We’ve got a busy day of baseball with a 10-game slate starting at 1:10pm ET and then a 4-game evening slate at the usual 7:05pm start time. I’m going to jump right into this early slate, and then will be back later with a brief look at some MLB DFS picks for the evening games.
We’ll have an early Crunchtime at 11:20am ET, so join us there to get some final thoughts after we see all the early lineups come in.
Wednesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
This is not a thrilling slate for pitching. We have Max Scherzer up top, but he comes with some question marks, followed by a bevy of decent pitchers. There aren’t clear tiers, so let’s just take a look at all the options in one big clump:
Max Scherzer at Dodgers
Justin Steele at A’s
Taijuan Walker at White Sox
Eric Lauer at Mariners
Charlie Morton at Padres
Trevor Rogers vs. Giants
Alex Cobb at Marlins
Brady Singer vs. Rangers
Cal Quantrill at Tigers
Mike Clevinger vs. Phillies
Marco Gonzales vs. Brewers
Spoiler alert – I wrote the beginning of this pitcher section before FanDuel had released their slate, and what do you know. FD continues to outsharp themselves, as they have priced Justin Steele $1,100 above Max Scherzer. That makes me feel less on an island with what I’m about to say (that’s the spoiler, I prefer Steele straight up), but this does throw an interesting wrinkle into things. OK, on with the show…
Max Scherzer kind of looks like he should be the no-brainer SP1 as the only ace on this slate, but there are some real question marks here. First of all, he’s facing the Dodgers. Secondly, he’s the most expensive pitcher on the DK slate. Third, he really hasn’t been great this season, with a 21.5% K rate and 10.8% walks through three starts. Fourthly (4th-Lee?), his velocity is at its lowest level since 2014. And finally, this start was pushed back a few days due to soreness in his side/back. I don’t know exactly where a side/back is located on the body, I have just the one back and the two sides, all as separate things, but anyhow, he was sore.
I really wish we had a stronger pitching slate so I could easily just fade him and feel good about it, but as it is, I am going to have to fade him and not feel great about it. Officially, this guy has been so great for so long that I expect him to be fine, if not great again, sooner than later. And I am not by any means completely fading him. But I want to see if we can find at least two other pitchers to push Scherzer down the list a ways.
Well, Justin Steele is one. In 27 starts since last season, we’re looking at a solid 24.8% K rate. And while his control is borderline at 9.6% walks, the 52% ground balls help make up for it. He’s pitched brilliantly in two of his three starts this season, and he’s gone 96 and 101 pitches in his last two games. While Scherzer faces the Dodgers, Steele gets a trip to pitcher-friendly Oakland to face one of the weakest lineups in the league. It sounds wonky as all get out, but I prefer Steele over Scherzer straight up. Not based on salary or ownership or anything else. I just prefer Steele. What a time to be alive.
OK, now we’re back to where I am picking up after seeing the FD salaries. Yeah, I like Justin Steele, but LOL. He’s my DK SP1 but just a guy I maybe throw in on FD.
I want to like Taijuan Walker, but he just doesn’t make that possible. He’s at a below average 20.4% K rate since the start of last season, and so far this year, the control has been awful with 15.4% walks. He has plenty of leash with pitch count, but he’s hurt by his own inefficiency. At his salary, he’s basically off my list.
Eric Lauer is another guy who I wish I could like, but I just don’t. He’s a power-prone lefty facing a Seattle team loaded with right-handed power, and while there is moderate strikeout upside, that is outweighed by the risk.
Charlie Morton, hmmm. I can say that I prefer him to the 6am News team of Walker and Lauer, but that’s about as much endorsement as I can give him. His strikeouts and swinging strikes are down this year so far, that it makes me nervous for a 39-year-old. The velocity is fine, and I generally think he’s still going to be an above average pitcher, but I would want more discount before having much interest in a matchup in San Diego.
Maybe Trevor Rogers? You know, I think yeah, this is the other guy. He looked outstanding back in 2021, then took a step back in a relatively disappointing, injury-riddled 2022 season. So far this year, his strikeouts and swinging strikes are up above last season, and his walk rate through three starts is at the lowest mark of his career. To be clear, he’s really only looked great once this season and a couple times down the stretch last year. The only reason I’m excited here is that I just desperately want to be excited about anyone else on this slate. I prefer him ahead of Walker, Lauer, and Morton even before the slight discount, putting him firmly in my primary player pool today. On FD, he kind of ends up as a potential SP1 due to the high salary on Steele.
Alex Cobb continues to post great looking peripherals while getting BABIP’d around like nobody’s business. At some point, this just has to be who he is. The strikeouts are decent, the control is great, and the ground balls are great. In theory, he should be great. But in reality, he’s just not great. With the ground balls, he hasn’t given up many runs this season even with the high BABIP, but it’s chased him early from two of his three starts. I don’t know when it just becomes stubborn nonsense to say the skills look good and it has to come around, but well, the skills look good and it has to come around. The $7,700 price tag on DK puts him firmly right in the middle of the primary pool. I prefer Steele and Rogers, but if I need the extra salary, I’m quite content landing here.
You could probably get away with putting Cal Quantrill in the top tier, whatever that means, based on his being currently alive, right-handed, and facing the Tigers. But goodness gracious, does a 12% strikeout rate really qualify as being alive? The guy has three strikeouts per start so far this year, with at least three runs allowed in each of them. Yeah, the Tigers are bad, but I’m not paying $8,300 for Cal Quantrill. Cut It Out. On FD, he’s only $7,000, which is somewhat viable, but I prefer the next guy on our list.
Today’s episode of Things That Make Me Go Hmmmm features Brady Singer. What I cannot figure out in the slightest is whether he was good or bad in his last start against Atlanta. 10 hits and eight runs with four homers in five innings? Yikes, bad. Of course, it was Atlanta, but still bad. However, eight strikeouts and no walks? Very, very good. And even if getting hit hard, a 57% HR/FB rate is nonsense. OK, so he was bad; I can’t color it otherwise. But we’re looking at a guy with a career 23.2% K rate and 7.4% walks who was strong across the board last season with a 24.2% K rate, 5.6% BB rate, and 49% ground balls. I like him, I really do. If all these pitchers were at similar salaries, Singer would be kind of a leftover. But with his discount, I’m very interested on both sites. I think I’ll call him my SP5 before accounting for salary.
I am not going to waste my time talking about Marco Gonzales today. He’s always fine-ish, but not really. I don’t want to waste my time talking about Mike Clevinger either, but somebody might say, ‘hey, he has a 2.20 ERA!’. Yeah, he does. He also has a 5.59 SIERA with a 19.7% K rate and a 14.1% BB rate. I’m out.
The other thing I’ll mention is that if you desperately need a punt on DK, Jake Woodford at $5,500 is moderately viable. He’s a very low strikeout pitcher with no upside, but he is a guy with solid control and ground balls. I don’t think he’s necessary here, but if I have to go super cheap, he would be my choice.
PITCHING CLIFF NOTES
Even without factoring in salary, I just see enough red flags on Max Scherzer to say he is not a priority. Officially, he is my SP3. When we start to look at salary, he falls to my SP5 on DK, behind Justin Steele, Trevor Rogers, Alex Cobb, and Brady Singer.
With that being said, he is still Max Scherzer. I don’t actually think that he’s just old and done. I expect to see plenty of elite ace games from him this season, and I’m not going to be shocked if one of them is today. He is absolutely in my primary pool, and I’ll have something close to an even split of my top five pitchers.
On FanDuel, with the salaries on Steele and Scherzer, Trevor Rogers is the SP1, though I’m just as happy going down to Brady Singer at $7,300 if I need that extra cash for bats.
There are a ton of other decent pitchers that I touched on briefly, and feel free to sprinkle them all in if you want to spread out more today. I’d rank the rest of them something like Cal Quantrill, Charlie Morton, Jake Woodford (DK), Eric Lauer, Taijuan Walker.
Wednesday Hitting: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
We’re back with another Coors Field slate where the Pirates will take center stage against Austin Gomber. However, we do have several other teams that could fit into this top tier and then a bunch of teams that have upside, or at least individual bats that would qualify as top tier options. I will start with a smaller list that I’m going to call four top tier teams, but then the big 11-team second tier is not far behind at all.
TOP TIER OFFENSE
Pittsburgh Pirates at Austin Gomber
Colorado Rockies vs. Johan Oviedo
St. Louis Cardinals vs. Madison Bumgarner
Atlanta Braves at Nick Martinez
TIER TWO OFFENSE
Cleveland Guardians at Spencer Turnbull
SD Padres vs. Charlie Morton
Chicago Cubs at Mason Miller
Seattle Mariners vs. Eric Lauer
Milwaukee Brewers at Marco Gonzales
NY Mets at Noah Syndergaard
LA Dodgers vs. Max Scherzer
KC Royals vs. Martin Perez
Philadelphia Phillies at Mike Clevinger
Chicago White Sox vs. Taijuan Walker
Arizona Diamondbacks at Jake Woodford
The Coors Conundrum Again
The case to fade Coors is the same as it’s been the past two days – it’s the Pirates and Rockies. On top of that, we have a lot of good offense on this slate. Adding more fuel to that, there is the possibility that Johan Oviedo is turning himself into a good pitcher. If we play my favorite little game of ‘would we like this game if it wasn’t in Coors’, the answer is a very clear no for me. There is not a single Rockies bat that qualifies as a target against Oviedo.
On the Pirates side, I’d love to attack Gomber. But against lefties, the Pirates are nothing but a parade of ground ball hitters. I will toss some Pittsburgh stacks in MME, but this is a spot I’m thrilled to fade. But let me also point out that it will likely not be nearly as chalky as we’ve seen the past couple days, so you’re not really being overly sneaky by fading Coors today.
I consider the obvious best offense on this slate to be the Cardinals against Madison Bumgarner. Bumgarner is simply one of the worst pitchers in the league at this point, and he is severely overmatched here. Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado are my top two plays on the slate. There is nothing sneaky about this, but hopefully the salaries keep ownership in check. I am playing everyone in this Cardinals lineup early and often, both in stacks and on their own.
The other top team on my list is the Braves against Nick Martinez. Martinez is a low strikeout pitcher who has had control issues and power issues so far this season. He has a very slight ground ball lean but not nearly enough to make up for the lack of strikeouts. Matt Olson and Austin Riley are my favorites here. But like with St. Louis, I will be playing all Atlanta bats early and often, both in stacks and on their own.
Sorting The Big Second Tier
In this big gaggle of 11 teams, I am mostly noticing individual bats that I want to focus on. This is what the top of that list looks like:
Kyle Schwarber at Clevinger
Jose Ramirez at Turnbull
Eugenio Suarez, Julio Rodriguez, Teoscar Hernandez vs. Lauer
Juan Soto vs. Morton
Pete Alonso at Syndergaard
Willy Adames at Gonzales
Bobby Witt, Salvador Perez vs. Perez
I could pick out several other names, but this group stands out to me. When I look at this group of bats, combined with the Cardinals and Braves, I begin to get a very clear picture of how I want to build lineups today. I want to start by focusing on spend-up bats, and then I’ll just fill in random cheap pieces that correlate to make everything work.
I am quite content with that strategy based on how closely bunched all these teams are for stacking purposes. Doing my best to rank them, I end up with a list looking like this:
Cubs, Mariners, Guardians, Phillies, Brewers, Padres, Mets, White Sox, Royals
Salary Matters
Now when I look at salaries, what I find is that there are a lot of bats that are quite suddenly priced way up on DK. Meanwhile, on FD, we have the same very simple build with a lot of outstanding cheap bats.
Just for a few examples on FD, we have the usual cheap pricing on guys like Kyle Schwarber, Willson Contreras, Tyler O’Neill, Eugenio Suarez, Teoscar Hernandez, Ozzie Albies, and on and on. There is really no reason at all to play any sub-par bats for salary purposes on FD. This makes me a little more willing to skip full stacking on FD, or at least skip 4-4 stacking.
But on DK, it gets trickier in a hurry if you start with 2-3 of the high-end bats. There are only a small handful of bats below $3,500 that I’d want to play on their own, with everything else falling into stacking only. This is who I’m looking at:
Franmil Reyes, Cody Bellinger, Christian Walker, Jordan Walker, Andrew Vaughn, Edward Olivares, Eddie Rosario, A.J. Pollock
That is not a very long list. This goes right back to my original thought of building around my high-end bats, and then I’ll simply fill in the remaining spots with whatever nonsense correlates with it.
HITTING CLIFF NOTES
There is a ton to love on this slate, but most of it is expensive and at least fairly obvious.
My first takeaway is that Coors Field is not a priority in any way for me today. The Cardinals and Braves are the only teams that end up in my extremely official Top Tier. It’s so very official.
After them, it’s just a muddled mess for stacking. Again, my next priority is not to randomly start picking stacks, it’s to get as many of my top bats as I can get. This is how I have them ranked:
Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado, Austin Riley, Matt Olson, Ronald Acuna, Kyle Schwarber, Jose Ramirez, Pete Alonso
For a moment, let’s imagine we have no salary cap and everyone has the same ownership. This is how I rank my stacks:
Cardinals, Braves, gap, Pirates, Cubs, Mariners, Guardians, Rockies, Phillies
Now, adding in salary and ownership, the only thing that changes at all for me is moving the Pirates down a few spots. I also will move the Royals and Brewers up behind the Phillies when adding salary in.
Wednesday Night Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
Joe Ryan at Red Sox – 26.3% K, 7.4% BB, 3.47 ERA, 3.80 SIERA
Kyle Bradish at Nationals – 21.9% K, 9.1% BB, 4.83 ERA, 4.14 SIERA
MacKenzie Gore vs. Orioles – 24.2% K, 12.6% BB, 4.24 ERA, 4.45 SIERA
Luis Garcia vs. Blue Jays – 24.2% K, 7.6% BB, 4.04 ERA, 3.86 SIERA
Jhony Brito vs. Angels – 17.4% K, 8.7% BB, 6.75 ERA, 4.82 SIERA
Corey Kluber vs. Twins – 20.4% K, 3.6% BB, 4.53 ERA, 3.91 SIERA
Jose Berrios at Astros – 20.4% K, 5.9% BB, 5.45 ERA, 4.04 SIERA
Griffin Canning at Yankees
This is a weird little group of pitchers tonight. They are all at least sort of kind of OK pitchers. There is nobody terrible here, but there are mostly tough matchups or guys with question marks.
Far and away the most talented pitcher on this slate is Joe Ryan. I liked him the most coming into the season, and he has looked even more spectacular than I’d hoped with back-to-back 10-K games and a 37.1% K rate for the season. His salary is high, and the matchup is not great, but I am just seeing those as reasons why he shouldn’t be overly popular despite being the best pitcher on the slate. He is my runaway SP1.
With matchup and salary factored in, my hunch is that MacKenzie Gore and Kyle Bradish end up as the chalk. You can do whatever you want with bats if you play these two together.
Kyle Bradish has the best matchup on the slate against a very low power Nationals lineup. This will be his first start off the IL, but it was not an arm injury, and he threw 85 pitches in a rehab start, so I consider him a full go. The problem is we just don’t really know if he’s any good. We are simply deciding between better pitchers in tougher matchups, or just hoping we get something closer to the strong Triple-A numbers of Bradish. I have always been a believer in his talent, and I think this is the slate to jump on board. Because of the huge matchup edge, even if he’s just kind of OK, at $6,600 that should be plenty.
MacKenzie Gore is similar to Bradish in that he has not yet lived up to his pedrigree. What I don’t like as much about Gore is that even in the minors, his control was all over the place, and it’s been a huge problem so far with a 12.6% BB rate in 85 major league innings and 10 walks in 15 innings this season. He has shown more strikeout ability than Bradish, and while Baltimore is a better team than Washingon, they do come with more strikeouts. So for pure upside potential, I would say Gore is ahead of Bradish, but personally, I have more downside concerns with Gore. I am fine with both, love neither, and officially prefer Bradish.
After Ryan, Bradish and Gore, we’re looking at OK pitchers in tough spots. I really don’t like the idea of playing something like average pitchers in the Blue Jays-Astros game. Luis Garcia is playable because of the slate, but I’m much more interested in bats here.
Corey Kluber should probably be something like almost OK, but we’re looking at a low strikeout pitcher who has been very limited in pitch count. The Twins have enough strikeouts in the lineup to offer a twinge of per inning upside, and it’s enough for me to put Kluber ahead of Garcia but not ahead of Gore.
Jhony Brito and Griffin Canning are big question marks on a slate where we already have salary savers to prefer ahead of them. You can absolutely just play a little of every pitcher on this slate and hope to catch the magical combo, but I can’t make any actual case for these guys tonight other than ‘it’s baseball’.
PITCHING CLIFF NOTES
There is nothing to love tonight, but really nothing awful either. For me, I see Joe Ryan as so clearly the most talented pitcher here that he is my SP1. I’ll mostly pair one of Kyle Bradish and MacKenzie Gore with him, with my lean being to Bradish.
Once I get deeper into MME, I’ll throw a dart at basically everyone else, in this order – Corey Kluber, Luis Garcia, Jhony Brito, Griffin Canning, Jose Berrios
Wednesday Night Hitting: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
This is one of those slates where just as everything is kind of just OK on the pitching side, it’s all just kind of OK on the hitting side. We have mostly good teams, but mostly decent opposing starters.
For me, the Yankees’ power bats are the clear top options, with the cheaper bats fitting in nicely to make them the top stack as well. Even if we were to see the good Griffin Canning (whatever that means), he has a career 1.59 HR/9 to righties with way too many hard hits and fly balls. Aaron Judge is the top play on the slate, Gleyber Torres is #2 for me, and then I’m quite content loading up Anthony Rizzo with them and then just filling out the rest based on positional needs and salary.
After the Yankees, I’m going with full stacks in the Blue Jays-Astros game, followed by picking out some favorite individual bats elsewhere. That mostly looks like Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout, Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, Vladimir Guerrero, Bo Bichette and Byron Buxton as a quite obvious, yet fantastical group of pivots off of Judge.
Even with just a 4-game slate, this is pretty close to a simple list of the best hitters in baseball. In every lineup I build, I plan to have at least 2-3 of these high-end bats, whether they are in a stack or not.
The biggest wild card on the slate for me is the Orioles. If there’s a team with a clear path to beating the Yankees, Blue Jays and Astros, this is it. As touched on in the pitching section, MacKenzie Gore has been extremely wild, and the bullpen behind him is nonsense. They don’t have quite as much firepower as some of the other top teams, but there is a strong build around trio with Adley Rutschman, Ryan Mountcastle and Anthony Santander.
Officially, when I put this all together, I end up with a reasonably closely bunched list of stacks that looks like this:
Yankees, small gap, Blue Jays, Astros, Orioles, small gap, Twins, Angels, gap, Red Sox, Nationals
HITTING CLIFF NOTES
There is really not much to say about this weird little 4-game slate. Essentially, I love the very obvious high-end bats that should be obvious to everyone.
The Yankees are the only stack I love enough to qualify as a top-tier. I’m going to be well ahead of the field on Yankees, with a bunch of variations of what I do around Judge, Torres and Rizzo. I’ll also be building some bottom-of-the-order Yankees stacks without 1-2 of those big bats and filtering in these other stud bats:
Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout, Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, Vladimir Guerrero, Bo Bichette, Byron Buxton
With looking to jam in as many of those high-end bats as possible, we’ll need several salary savers in most lineups. These are some standouts for me tonight:
Willie Calhoun, Anthony Volpe, Oswaldo Cabrera, Franchy Cordero, Matt Thaiss, Max Kepler, Trevor Larnach, Edouard Julien, Jose Miranda, Michael Taylor, Alex Call, Dominic Smith, Keibert Ruiz, Stone Garrett, James McCann, Corey Julks, Jake Meyers, Brandon Belt, Cavan Biggio
That is plenty of value to make anything work. Most notably, the Twins jump pretty far up the list when I start factoring in salaries.