Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Friday 8/22

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-08-22 19:20:33 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 have a massive 13-game slate that appears to have a whole bunch of everything. I can find pitching options I like all the way from $6,000-$10,500 on DK and somewhere between 0 and 17 stacks that I could consider top-tier options.

It is going to be very tough to narrow things down, and this is definitely one of those slates where you could have a completely different set of rankings than me, and I wouldn’t argue with you for a second. The good news is that at least the MLB weather looks likely to cooperate, so let’s dive in and see if we can find some way to sort through all this.

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Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

The top tier has a couple of the best pitchers in the league, though they are still a bit more in the ‘better in real life’ category, making for an interesting decision on whether or not to spend up.

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Bryan Woo vs. A’s – 25.5% K, 4.7% BB, 3.02 ERA, 3.42 SIERA
• Nathan Eovaldi vs. Guardians – 25.5% K, 4.5% BB, 1.76 ERA, 3.20 SIERA
• Max Fried vs. Red Sox – 22.9% K, 6% BB, 3.26 ERA, 3.64 SIERA
• Blake Snell at Padres – 22.9% K, 11.9%Q BB, 1.80 ERA, 4.51 SIERA
• Shane Bieber at Marlins – 1st start of season
• Nolan McLean at Braves – 2nd start of career
• Casey Mize vs. Royals – 22% K, 6.2% BB, 3.63 ERA, 3.95 SIERA

Bryan Woo and Nathan Eovaldi are both fantastic real-life pitchers with nearly identical skill sets. Bad starts are very few and far between for both of them, and if we were playing DFS with no salary cap, I would lock them into every single lineup on DK and move on with my day. However, we are playing with a salary cap, and as great as they are, they also don’t often post ceiling games that you can’t possibly win without. While I prefer the matchup for Eovaldi, when adding in the home ballpark for Woo, I’d say they end up with pretty similar matchups tonight. It’s all so close that I am going to play the ownership game with them, and at this point, I’m guessing that Woo ends up as the more popular SP1 based on projections. I would choose Eovaldi anyway in a 51/49 decision, so with that potential ownership edge on top of it, Eovaldi is my SP1.

If you’re a game-log watcher, you’re not going to want to play Max Fried tonight. He has been BABIP’d around for the last month or so, posting a scary 7.06 ERA over his last 4 starts. When I look under the hood, I don’t see any red flags, and I really think he’s fine. The most likely case is that he’s simply run into a bad run on batted balls and this is the same good real-life pitcher he’s always been. At first glance, it looks like a matchup you might want to avoid, but the numbers tell a different story. Boston is one of the highest-strikeout teams in the league against LHP, with 6 of the 9 batters in their projected lineup above a 26% K rate this season. There is a little bit of power, but it is nothing to be overly concerned about. I’m a little torn here, and this is another spot where I do care what the projected ownership is. I definitely prefer Eovaldi and Woo, but Fried is ~$1,000 cheaper than them on DK and ~$1,500 cheaper on FD. If in fact he’s fine and this has just been BABIP nonsense, then he’s underpriced in comparison. I need to wait and see what we find at lower salaries. In general, I still like Fried, and I like the matchup to say he’s fairly priced tonight.

Blake Snell is the complete opposite of Woo and Eovaldi. He’s going to be anywhere from amazing or terrible, and no one can tell you where he lands on that spectrum.

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