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

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-08-08 17:07:31 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 14-game slate that has a bunch of everything. On a slate this big, you can make a case to spread out far and wide on both sides of the ledger. I’m going to do my best to narrow down to a manageable primary pool for both pitching and hitting, but feel free to widen the pool on either side for MME.

It looks like the MLB weather is going to cooperate tonight, though it is also cooling down around the country (thank goodness!), so we don’t have a ton of great hitting environments, further muddling the already tangled slate.

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Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

We have a loaded pitching slate, with a top tier that includes 6 pitchers with ERAs below 3.00, and then a huge mid-tier of similarly skilled pitchers, and many of them in good matchups. This is going to be tough to narrow down, but let’s see what we can find:

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Tarik Skubal vs. Angels – 34% K, 3.6% BB, 2.18 ERA, 2.39 SIERA
• Brandon Woodruff vs. Mets – 35.6% K, 3.8% BB, 2.22 ERA, 2.60 SIERA
• Hunter Brown at Yankees – 30.4% K, 7.6% BB, 2.47 ERA, 3.12 SIERA
• Nick Pivetta vs. Red Sox – 27% K, 6.3% BB, 2.73 ERA, 3.49 SIERA
• Cristopher Sanchez at Rangers – 26% K, 6.1% BB, 2.40 ERA, 3.04 SIERA
• Joe Ryan vs. Royals – 28.3% K, 5% BB, 2.83 ERA, 3.17 SIERA

All 6 of these aces are playable on any slate in any matchup. But at least we can start by saying that if salary is no issue, just play Tarik Skubal. He is as elite as they come and is starting to pile up the strikeouts again, with 10+ Ks in 4 of his last 6 starts. The strikeouts in the Angels lineup outweigh the power risk for a pitcher like Skubal, and it’s not a matter of if he’s the SP1, only if we can afford him.

I am not going to try and play all 6 of these aces, and Joe Ryan and Hunter Brown are the first to miss my cut. Ryan has the lowest-strikeout matchup of this tier and is likely to face 5 lefties, where his K rate this season dips to just 22.7%. Brown is great, and he can absolutely beat the Yankees; I just don’t need to pay $10,000 for a guy facing a lineup with this much power risk on this slate.

The biggest mystery here is Brandon Woodruff. If we can believe the numbers through 5 starts, then he’s basically Tarik Skubal at a discount. The pitch count has slowly crept up, getting to 88 pitches in his last start, so he could see 90+ at this point. I’m still officially ‘concerned’ and befuddled at how he can come back from an injury and post a career-high K% while also having a career low in velocity and Stuff+, with his lowest swinging strike rate since 2018. He has had pretty good matchups to start his season, so that could play into it a bit, but it’s also likely just small sample size noise. The good news is that he has a lot of room to pull back, and even if he were to slip below his career 29.1% K rate, he can still be an ace. I don’t like the matchup, and I’m simply not buying the numbers we’ve seen so far, so for me, he also misses the primary pool.

I will pause at this point and say that while Brown and Woodruff are absolutely playable, I will go out of my way to get up to Skubal ahead of them.

Cristopher Sanchez has a slightly lower strikeout rate than the top aces but more than makes up for it with his 58% ground-ball rate to go along with his great control. He’s also shown more than enough ceiling to match any of these aces in any given start. Texas against lefties is a far better matchup than what either Brown or Woodruff has. With the ground balls added in, I prefer Sanchez to them even if they all had the same matchup. He is my SP2 on this slate and my SP1 if I can’t afford Skubal.

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