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

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-04-04 15:54:11 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 an unusual day with games spread out all over the place. Both FD and DK have a 7-game main slate that starts a few minutes earlier than usual at 6:45 p.m. ET. I’ll focus on that, but we’ll take a quick peek first at the early DK slate that has 6 games starting at 1:10 p.m. ET. FD has again split up all the early games into mini slates, so I’m not going to be looking at those.

In addition to the games being all over the place, the weather is also all over the place. We could see snow in the first Coors Field game of the season, and we’ve got a cold, damp day to help pitching at Wrigley Field. After those early games, we have several games with moderate concern from rain, so you’ll need to keep an eye on the MLB weather page throughout the day.

Friday Early Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

One thing I want to note right out of the gate here – there is a pitcher named Luis F. Castillo who is starting for the Mariners. This is NOT the same Luis Castillo that we are used to as an ace for the Mariners. We’ll touch on this Castillo, but I didn’t want anyone to glance and see a $7,300 Castillo for Seattle and think it was a lock button.

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TOP TIER PITCHING

• Shota Imanaga vs. Padres – 25.1% K, 4% BB, 2.91 ERA, 3.50 SIERA
• Max Fried at Pirates – 23.2% K, 8% BB, 3.25 ERA, 3.61 SIERA
• Kevin Gausman at Mets – 21.4% K, 7.4% BB, 3.83 ERA, 4.24 SIERA
• Mitch Keller vs. Yankees – 21.5% K, 6.5% BB, 4.25 ERA, 4.08 SIERA
• Erick Fedde at Red Sox – 21.2% K, 7.2% BB, 3.30 ERA, 4.19 SIERA
• Justin Verlander vs. Mariners – 18.7% K, 6.8% BB, 5.48 ERA, 4.80 SIERA

I’m going to start at the bottom of this tier with Justin Verlander. He really doesn’t belong in this tier based on his 2024 skill set, and in general, I’m very concerned about him this season. However, he is still a guy who can throw strikes, and this is a great matchup for a fly ball pitcher with a declining skill set. He also saw a very slight tick back up in his velocity in his first start, at least closer to 2023 levels. I think his control is going to be good, and it’s conceivable he’s at least close to an average strikeout pitcher. Facing the high-strikeout Mariners in a good ballpark, that’s enough to be viable at $7,500. Let’s see what we have ahead of him before deciding what to do with that information.

The two best pitchers on this slate are a little more of the ‘better in real life’ category, with Shota Imanaga and Max Fried. Imanaga also has a low-strikeout matchup with San Diego, but what he loses from the strikeouts, he gains back with excellent pitching weather in Wrigley Field. Projections appear to slightly favor Max Fried at this point, but I’m going with Imanaga as my SP1. Freid didn’t pitch great in his first start, but everything looks fine with his usual ground ball rate and identical velocity to last season. This is a plus matchup, and while I slightly prefer Imanaga, these two stand out ahead of the pack. If I can afford to start with both of them, I won’t overthink it.

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