Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Friday 8/21

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood)

Created Aug 21, 2026

Last Updated 2026-08-21 16:27:03 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 today. 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 muse about the August 21, 2026 MLB DFS slate.

Happy Friday! We have a big and tricky 13-game slate on tap tonight. The pitching pool is very deep, with almost no bad pitchers anywhere. This also leads to fewer great offenses than we’d expect to see on a slate this size. We do have a Coors Field game, but even that is a little sketchy with the Guardians’ underwhelming offense traveling to Colorado and the Rockies facing a lefty. I’m going to narrow my pool down as much as possible on both sides, but this is a slate where everything looks pretty tangled at first glance.

Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on DraftKings and FanDuel

We have a pretty strong group of top-tier pitchers, with the $8,000 mark on DK being a clean cutoff point before we drop down to the next tier, which still has plenty of good pitchers that will make this slate even trickier to sort through:

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Cam Schlittler vs. Blue Jays – 31.4% K, 5.6% BB, 2.19 ERA, 2.85 SIERA
• Yoshinobu Yamamoto vs. Pirates – 24.5% K, 6.1% BB, 2.60 ERA, 3.55 SIERA
• Troy Melton at Royals – 22.2% K, 7.6% BB, 1.71 ERA, 4.04 SIERA
• Logan Webb at Red Sox – 19.6% K, 5.7% BB, 3.50 ERA, 3.90 SIERA
• Sonny Gray vs. Giants – 21.8% K, 6.3% BB, 2.65 ERA, 3.82 SIERA
• Sean Burke vs. Mets – 27% K, 7.4% BB, 3.15 ERA, 3.50 SIERA
• Reid Detmers at Rangers – 28.8% K, 7.4% BB, 3.78 ERA, 3.36 SIERA
• Matthew Boyd at Mariners – 19.2% K, 7.3% BB, 4.02 ERA, 4.38 SIERA
• MacKenzie Gore vs. Angels – 25.8% K, 8.5% BB, 4.45 ERA, 3.78 SIERA

There’s no way I’m going to try and play all 9 of these in primary lineups, and I see a couple pretty easy cuts to start with. The first is Logan Webb. He is not coming at any discount, and not only is he the lowest-strikeout pitcher in this tier, he was also dealing with back and shoulder tightness in his last start after he got hit in the shoulder with a comebacker. He is almost certainly healthy or they wouldn’t be starting him, but I still don’t think we need this low strikeout rate even before adding on a slight chance of some lingering effects from that shoulder.

The other easy cut for me is Troy Melton, who is really quite good but has been priced up too close to guys like Schlittler and Yamamoto based on a fluky low ERA. There’s just no world in which I’m paying $9,800 on DK or $9,900 on FD for a guy with a 22.2% K rate who hasn’t topped 5 strikeouts in his last 5 games.

With a couple cuts out of the way, let’s look up top with Cam Schlittler and Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Both of these guys are consistent, elite pitchers who I will gladly play in any matchup on any slate. However, this is also a slate where just an average game for an $11,000 pitcher is probably not going to get you where you’re trying to go. Both of these aces obviously have the ceiling to put up 30+ DK points or 50+ FD points every time they take the mound, but that is also never the most likely outcome. Between the two of them, Schlittler has the much better DFS skill set with his higher strikeout rate, but Yamamoto has a better strikeout matchup tonight and has surprisingly had a higher and more consistent pitch count. Looking at Schlittler’s matchup, he is getting most of his strikeouts against lefties, and Toronto is both a low-strikeout team overall and likely to lean slightly more right-handed. For Yamamoto, it’s still not a great matchup, but there are a couple more high-strikeout bats than what Schlittler faces. I don’t have a strong preference between the two, but I guess I’ll say I ever so slightly prefer Yamamoto in this matchup.

This next group of pitchers is what makes me think we can probably get by without spending up for Schlittler and Yamamoto tonight.

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