Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Friday 4/11

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-04-11 18:49:37 Premium Content Part of the product MLB DFS

Whether you are looking for the top pitchers or the best stacks, Dave Potts (aka CheeseIsGood) has you covered with an extensive deep dive into his MLB DFS picks. Cheese, one of the preeminent baseball minds in all of fantasy sports and 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.

Updates to Friday’s MLB DFS Picks

2:20pm ET: We finally have a DK salary up for David Festa, the Twins starting pitcher. He is all the way down at $6,500, which is enough to change my thoughts on this slate a fair amount. I still ever so slightly prefer Reese Olson at $7,100, but Festa has a lot of upside for $6,500 in this matchup. Between the two them, I am going to have a cheaper SP in almost all of my DK lineups. This also basically removes German Marquez and Sean Newcomb from my player pool.

Happy Friday! We have a big 13-game slate, our first typical Friday night of this new season. It’s a little bit of a different puzzle to solve with this many games compared to the smaller split slates we’ve been seeing. While everything and everyone is still viable in the big MME contests, I’m not going to be trying to talk through every possible pitcher and stack. I’ll narrow things down as best as I can; just always keep in mind, your pool can look completely different from mine on these big slates, and it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.

There are a couple of dicey weather situations on the East Coast, and based on where we’re starting on the MLB weather page, I am not including the TOR/BAL game in my analysis, just assuming that gets postponed. I’ll keep the SF/NYY game in the rankings, but personally, I won’t have players from that game in my initial lineups.

Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

There are a lot of good pitchers on this slate, and I’m going to start sorting by salary, with this top tier all being above $8,000 on DK.

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Jacob deGrom at Mariners – 50 IP since 2022
• Bryce Miller vs. Rangers – 23.8% K, 6.6% BB, 3.10 ERA, 3.87 SIERA
• Yoshinobu Yamamoto vs. Cubs – 28.8% K, 6.5% BB, 2.80 ERA, 3.08 SIERA
• Taj Bradley vs. Braves – 27% K, 8.2% BB, 4.17 ERA, 3.64 SIERA
• Aaron Nola at Cardinals – 23.8% K, 5.9% BB, 3.72 ERA, 3.66 SIERA
• Robbie Ray at Yankees – 28.3% K, 12.1% BB, 4.29 ERA, 4.05 SIERA
• Nick Pivetta vs. Rockies – 28.3% K, 6.1% BB, 4.05 ERA, 3.35 SIERA
• Ronel Blanco vs. Angels – 24.6% K, 10.4% BB, 3.05 ERA, 4.19 SIERA
• Eduardo Rodriguez vs. Brewers – 24.2% K, 8.7% BB, 5.22 ERA, 3.99 SIERA

The slate gets tricky right out of the gate with Jacob deGrom back on the mound in a great matchup in Seattle. Even after his dud as heavy chalk over the weekend, I would expect that between projections, matchup, and name recognition, he still comes in as the heavy chalk tonight. There is no way to know exactly what type of pitcher deGrom is going to be this season, but it does look pretty likely, based on the velocity and early returns, that he is not going to be at his other-worldly level from a few years ago. But with that being said, he’s still getting swings and misses, and this does not seem to me like a guy who is going to struggle to dominate if he’s ‘only’ throwing 97 mph instead of his old 98-99. For me, he’s still the clear SP1, and even though I expect him to be the chalk, he should at least lose a little ownership from his poor start and overall numbers being down so far. I’m happy to let everyone else overthink it and over-analyze. If I’m wrong, and deGrom is suddenly just an average pitcher, oh well, an average pitcher in Seattle is still a perfectly good spot. Plus, I can’t imagine a version of deGrom that is only average.

I am a fan of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and the skills look good, but at this point, the Cubs are a team I would much prefer to avoid if I can help it. Yamamoto is absolutely in the MME pool, but I’m not leaning on him heavily and would prefer to start with deGrom if I can only get one of them. With a similar salary to deGrom, that leaves Yamamoto out of my main set of primary lineups.

The Rockies are back on the road, which means it’s time to start picking on the Rockies again. Nick Pivetta has not been sharp yet this season and is not quite up to his usual velocity, so this is not a sure thing, but I’m expecting incremental improvement, and in this matchup, even just an OK Pivetta has plenty of upside. I don’t love that he’s almost as expensive as Yamamoto, but it’s such a big matchup difference that I’m going to land on more Pivetta. But again, like with Yamamoto, I am prioritizing deGrom first and won’t often be able to afford two of them on DK.

Let me pause here and note that on FD, among these top three, the high salary of Yamamoto keeps him even further out of the primary pool, and with both deGrom and Pivetta below $10,000, the bulk of my lineups will have one of those two.

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