Million Dollar Musings: Wednesday, May 10
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 have a busy day on tap with games spread all throughout the day. Unfortunately, the sites do not align with their slates. What I am going to do is focus on the bigger slate for each site. That gives us a 9-game early slate on DK, starting at 11:35am ET, and a 6-game FD slate, starting at 6:35pm ET.
I’ll drop some quick thoughts in the Cliff Notes for the smaller slates on each site in case you just want to play a little of everything all over the place! It is going to take some ingenuity to get in lunch, a nap, ice cream, two Crunch Time shows, and 4 lineup builds. Whatever you do, don’t skip that ice cream. Giddy up!
Wednesday Afternoon Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
There are a ton of pitching options in multiple pricing tiers on this early DK slate. I’ll sort them into three buckets and then try to narrow down my list of favorites in each group.
Five Aces (Five Guys? Lunch?)
Kevin Gausman at Phillies – 29.2% K, 3.9% BB, 3.45 ERA, 2.90 SIERA
Zack Wheeler vs. Blue Jays – 27.1% K, 5.8% BB, 3.11 ERA, 3.27 SIERA
Clayton Kershaw at Brewers – 27.9% K, 5% BB, 2.34 ERA, 3.08 SIERA
Luis Castillo vs. Rangers – 27.1% K, 7% BB, 2.86 ERA, 3.38 SIERA
Cristian Javier at Angels – 31.6% K, 8.1% BB, 2.76 ERA, 3.27 SIERA
This is a fantastic group of pitchers up top today. Looking at the data going back to last year, you could quite easily make a case for any of them as the ace of this slate. If we focus in to just 2023 data, Kevin Gausman shoots up to the top of the board with a 33.1% K rate and just 4% walks. However, as great as that looks, it needs to be noted that he has allowed 7+ runs in two of his last four starts. So it’s not all sunshine and roses.
While I want to just brush it off as variance, looking at his velocity is a weird little experience. He has three starts this season with 94-95mph fastball velocity, randomly interspersed with games down at 91-92mph. Pitchers move around a little but not generally this much, this quickly. Plus, while the BABIP was expectedly high in those bad starts, he was also hit hard. So it wasn’t just complete batted ball luck.
Honestly, I have no idea what to make of him right now. I absolutely love the control with the big strikeout upside he’s shown in three of his starts this season, but there is at least some chance that there is something fishy going on here. If we didn’t have this many other aces, I’d just say let’s ignore the bad and assume he’s fine. But we do have four other aces—a couple of them in better matchups—so I’m pushing Gausman down my list.
