Covering The Bases: MLB DFS Picks Today for Saturday 4/18

by Justin Van Zuiden (stlcardinals84) Last Updated 2026-04-18 15:40:29 Premium Content Part of the product MLB DFS

Long-time grinder Justin Van Zuiden (aka stlcardinals84) is here to cover the bases for the upcoming MLB DFS slate on DraftKings and FanDuel. Whether you are looking for the top pitchers or the best stacks, Justin has you covered with an extensive deep dive into his favorite MLB DFS picks today on April 18, 2026.

Welcome to the weekend, MLB Grinders! It is great to be back with you for another year of weekend Covering The Bases articles! Thanks to Cheese for covering the first few weekends as I finished up my tax season CPA duties; his assistance is greatly appreciated at the start of the season.

My first article of the year brings a slate with games starting all over the place, which is pretty typical for Saturdays. DraftKings is offering us a 5-game appetizer of an afternoon slate that covers all the games that start at 4 PM Eastern, and then we have a 6-game main slate in the evening. I will cover both of those slates in the article today.

Let’s get the weekend started on a high note. Grab your favorite weekend beverage, read along, and let’s go!

Saturday Afternoon Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on DraftKings and FanDuel

TOP TIER PITCHERS

• Tarik Skubal at Red Sox
• Paul Skenes vs. Rays
• Sandy Alcantara vs. Brewers
• Brandon Woodruff at Marlins

We do have to monitor the weather in Pittsburgh this afternoon, as it looks a bit dicey at first glance. It’s a great pitching matchup between Paul Skenes and Drew Rasmussen, so this needs to be looked at as first pitch gets closer.

My introduction to MLB content this year offers me a fun slate with several ace-caliber arms. There are 4 pitchers that potentially fit that bill, which is pretty remarkable for such a small slate. I certainly can’t complain about getting a slate with both Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes to start things off.

For now, most of the statistical references that I put in this article will be full season 2025 numbers. That’s what you will see in my summary figures for now. Once the calendar flips to May, I will switch over and start using 2026 stats. Of course, I will still incorporate metrics from both years as necessary, but I want to clarify that the overall numbers will be from 2025 at the moment.

With the housekeeping out of the way, here are the aforementioned 2025 numbers for these aces:

Skubal – 2.21 ERA, 2.71 SIERA, 32.2% K, 4.4% BB
Skenes – 1.97 ERA, 3.10 SIERA, 29.5% K, 5.7% BB
Alcantara – 5.36 ERA, 4.38 SIERA, 19.1% K, 7.7% BB
Woodruff – 3.20 ERA, 2.90 SIERA, 32.3% K, 5.4% BB (64 innings)

The clear outlier in this group is Sandy Alcantara, but he still merits consideration in the ace tier because he has looked like his “old” self so far to start the 2026 season. In his first 3 starts, he pitched 24 1/3 innings and gave up just 2 total earned runs on 10 total hits. He is always capable of going deep into games, and the length gives him some ceiling despite his limited strikeouts. However, he was crushed back to reality in a terrible outing against the Tigers his last time out. I like him better against easier opponents. Today’s matchup does not qualify as such against a Brewers offense that always seems to be underrated as a whole and is very patient. This doesn’t feel like a ceiling spot, and Alcantara simply doesn’t make my pool on a day where we can pay just a little more for a Tarik Skubal or a Paul Skenes.

Before I discuss the top two pitchers, I’ll mention Brandon Woodruff on the other side of the Brewers/Marlins tilt. Woodruff had been hampered by injuries for a couple of seasons and threw just 64 big league innings in 2025, but he did largely look healthy by the end of the year. That’s a good sign for the Brewers now that Freddy Peralta is no longer around. They need Woodruff to be an ace again, and he might get there. His early 2026 returns aren’t fantastic, and the Marlins quietly rank 2nd in the league in team wOBA against RHP so far in 2026. You could possibly look to Woodruff in multi-entry GPP builds, but he won’t make my first 5 or 10 lineups.

That leaves us with two of the best pitchers in baseball, neither of which needs an introduction at this point. Tarik Skubal has been consistently dominant for several years now, racking up strikeout percentages north of 30% in each of the last 3 seasons. He hasn’t shown quite the same strikeout dominance yet in 2026, and his swinging strike rate is down quite a bit. However, it’s still just a small sample size, and I am not concerned at this point. However, it is also worth noting that even though Boston hasn’t been a strong offense so far in 2026, they are striking out at the 2nd-lowest clip in the major leagues against LHP so far at under 17%.

As for Paul Skenes, he doesn’t quite have the general upside of Skubal, though I think the general public tends to think he does. For whatever reason, Skenes gets a ton of media hype. His strikeouts are also down to start the year to a 25% mark, and he has walked more batters in his first handful of starts. Skenes draws a sub-optimal matchup against a Rays team that has the lowest team strikeout rate against RHP so far in 2026 at 17.9%.

So we have two aces who haven’t been in top form to start the year and have matchups that might limit their strikeout ceiling. They are also likely going to be popular. A contrarian approach today might be to go cheap at pitching if we have good options there. We’ll dig into that in a moment. For now, I’m loosely calling Skubal my SP1 and Skenes my SP2 based on their track records, but I wouldn’t consider either as an absolute “gotta have them” option. I’ll probably still end up with a lot of Skubal simply because he’s capable of dominating on any given day no matter what the matchup is.

SECONDARY ARMS

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