Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Friday 4/25

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-04-25 15:58:28 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.

Happy Friday! We’ve got a big 12-game slate tonight that features a huge pile of elite pitchers, but no shortage of top-tier offense either. At first glance, I see a slate where I’m going to prioritize pitching and go fishing for value bats, but there are also enough cheaper pitchers that you could flip that build if you want to be different.

We have one major weather concern to keep an eye on with the BOS/CLE game starting the day at Orange/Yellow on the MLB weather page. We’ll keep an eye on that throughout the day, but if it remains dicey, I am not going to mess with players in a questionable game.

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Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

We have an absolutely loaded pitching slate, with elite aces in great matchups and plenty of mid-tier pitchers with upside as well. Because of how many aces we have, I’m going to use $8,500 on DK as my cutoff point for the top tier.

ELITE ACES

• Logan Gilbert vs. Marlins – 28.6% K, 4.7% BB, 3.17 ERA, 3.03 SIERA
• Yoshinobu Yamamoto vs. Pirates – 30% K, 6.1% BB, 2.50 ERA, 2.89 SIERA
• Paul Skenes at Dodgers – 31.6% K, 5.7% BB, 2.14 ERA, 2.70 SIERA
• Michael King vs. Rays – 27.6% K, 8.7% BB, 2.90 ERA, 3.60 SIERA
• Chris Sale at Diamondbacks – 31.7% K, 5.7% BB, 2.82 ERA, 2.83 SIERA
• Shane Baz at Padres – 24.3% K, 8.6% BB, 3.10 ERA, 3.97 SIERA
• Nathan Eovaldi at Giants – 24.2% K, 5.4% BB, 3.62 ERA, 3.47 SIERA
• Andrew Abbott at Rockies – 20.8% K, 8.8% BB, 3.56 ERA, 4.59 SIERA

Well, folks, as always, you can do whatever you want and be as sneaky and off the board as you want to be. And sometimes, as we saw yesterday, even the most obvious plays can miss. But the more elite pitchers we have, the more likely it is that we get big scores out of at least some of them. When you add in the matchups for the guys up top, I am not going to be messing around at pitcher.

Logan Gilbert at home against the Marlins is as clear an SP1 as we’ve had all season. The matchup is ideal, the ballpark is ideal, and Gilbert has been an absolute superstar through 5 starts this season with an incredible 41:6 K:BB ratio in 27 innings. He’ll be the chalk, but there are enough other aces that I don’t think he’ll be chalky enough. You should know what I’m about to say here – Don’t Overthink It.

If we didn’t have Gilbert, you could say Don’t Overthink It with Yoshinobu Yamamoto against the Pirates. He’s been almost as good as Gilbert with a 38:7 K:BB ratio and hasn’t allowed a run in his last 3 starts. The matchup is close to as good as Gilbert’s, and he’s in the same salary range. My first goal today is to find enough value bats that I can just play these two aces and be done with it.

But it’s never that simple, because we still have Paul Skenes, Michael King, Shane Baz, Chris Sale, and Nathan Eovaldi. All five of these aces are above a 25% K rate so far this season, and none of them are above a 9% walk rate. On almost any other slate, I’d be content with any of them as the SP1, but tonight, they are just MME pivots.

Adding in matchups, I’m going with Michael King first and moving Chris Sale to the bottom of this tier. Sale just hasn’t been quite as sharp as the others this year, and the matchup is very tough.

Michael King has a similar strikeout matchup to Yamamoto and the same pitch count and overall upside in a best-case scenario. He’s my SP3.

Paul Skenes is matchup proof, however, it’s still a downgrade to face the Dodgers, and at some point, we need to look at his first 5 starts and say there is a possibility that he’s not going to be quite as elite a strikeout pitcher as he was last season. I’m not even remotely down on Skenes; I just wonder if maybe he settles in as more of a 28-30% K pitcher instead of a 32-35% K pitcher. Either way, he’s one of the top pitchers in the league; I just need some reason not to prioritize everyone in this tier. He’s my SP4.

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