Million Dollar Musings: Wednesday, September 13
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 bit of a tricky night with the sites giving us different groups of games to play with. On DK, we get a 7-game main slate starting at the usual 7:07 PM ET. FD is throwing some trickeration at us, starting earlier at 6:35 PM ET to add in an extra 4 games but also leaving off the late-night Padres-Dodgers game.
On the pitching side, the options are different enough that I’ll talk through the MLB DFS picks for each site separately.
We’ll also have some Expert tags/blurbs in LineupHQ for the 3-game afternoon slate if you want to mess with Coors Field on a 3-gamer.
Wednesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings
I’ll start on the DK side, where we don’t have Spencer Strider and it’s a bit trickier to find two options.
The top eight pitchers are all priced between $7,700-$10,100, so while Blake Snell and Zac Gallen are slightly in their own pricing tier, I’m going to lump all of these guys together:
Zac Gallen at Mets – 26% K, 5.2% BB, 3.31 ERA, 3.65 SIERA
Blake Snell at Dodgers – 31.1% K, 13.7% BB, 2.52 ERA, 4.16 SIERA
Hunter Brown vs. A’s – 26.9% K, 8.1% BB, 4.78 ERA, 3.70 SIERA
Mike Clevinger vs. Royals – 20.7% K, 8.4% BB, 3.64 ERA, 4.89 SIERA
Braxton Garrett at Brewers – 23.5% K, 4.2% BB, 3.82 ERA, 3.61 SIERA
Yusei Kikuchi vs. Rangers – 25.8% K, 6.9% BB, 3.57 ERA, 3.88 SIERA
Ryan Pepiot vs. Padres – 22.7% K, 2.7% BB [21 IP]
Jordan Montgomery at Blue Jays – 21.3% K, 6.4% BB, 3.62 ERA, 4.25 SIERA
The first thing that jumps out at me here is that this should be a slate where we have a chance to play the low-owned Blake Snell angle. The idea there is simply that even in the toughest of matchups, which this is, the good Blake Snell can be the best pitcher on this slate. Because of the lack of high-end options, it’s even more intriguing to play Snell tonight than it was last week in this similar situation. Snell put up a very respectable 24.7 DK points in Houston, and while I certainly don’t expect a ceiling game here, it’s in the realm of possibilities.
I’ve been trying to say this all season, and this is the perfect slate to say it even clearer – I don’t dislike Snell, and I don’t think Snell is bad. I think Snell is generally overvalued and over-trusted in good matchups but also undervalued and underappreciated in tough matchups.
Zac Gallen is absolutely my preferred spend-up ahead of Snell thanks to his much better control, which gives him a higher realistic ceiling in innings. But Gallen is much more sporadic with his strikeouts, and this is something like an average strikeout matchup against the Mets. I would certainly play Gallen ahead of Snell in cash games, but in large-field tournaments, it’s basically a 50/50 for me, knowing that will get me naturally over the field on Snell.
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