Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Friday 6/20

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-06-20 15:45:08 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! This big 13-game slate looks like a good old-fashioned barn burner with a ton to love on both the pitching and hitting sides in all different pricing tiers. I am seeing so many different ways to build great looking lineups that it’s possible ownership gets spread around enough not to matter.

While it looks like all the games are likely to play cleanly on the MLB weather page, it’s also important to note that there is a ton of great looking hitting weather with high temperatures and winds blowing out. This adds to the already high-scoring appearance of this slate.

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Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

There is a lot of great pitching on this slate, and plenty of solid options in the mid-tier as well. DK has really started to change their pricing recently, and we’re seeing more and more pitchers up over $10,000 and even up over $11,000. At the same time, FD has backed off their pitcher salaries a bit, and we’re starting to see their aces living more around $10,000. This is an interesting flip-flop from early in the year when all the DK salaries were bunched and FD more often had the top couple of aces priced way up. On a slate when we have a ton of bats to pay for, this makes me lean towards an underweight approach on the top pitchers on DK, but let’s dive in and see what happens.

There are a lot of different places you could draw the lines between tiers, but I’m going to sort everything into two buckets, using $8,500 on DK as the salary cutoff:

TOP TIER ACES

• Hunter Brown at Angels – 32.3% K, 8% BB, 1.88 ERA, 2.85 SIERA
• Zack Wheeler vs. Mets – 32.5% K, 5.6% BB, 2.76 ERA, 2.61 SIERA
• Max Fried vs. Orioles – 24.1% K, 5.4% BB, 1.89 ERA, 3.22 SIERA
• MacKenzie Gore at Dodgers – 33.6% K, 6.5% BB, 2.89 ERA, 2.63 SIERA
• Joe Ryan vs. Brewers – 28.3% K, 5.4% BB, 2.93 ERA, 3.10 SIERA
• Nick Pivetta vs. Royals – 27.7% K, 6.9% BB, 3.40 ERA, 3.36 SIERA
• Jack Flaherty at Rays – 29% K, 9% BB, 4.03 ERA, 3.40 SIERA

Hunter Brown has been awesome all season and ramped up to a season-high 12 strikeouts in his last start. He has 8+ strikeouts in 8 of his last 10 starts, and he’s only allowed more than 2 runs twice all year in 14 starts. Tonight he faces the highest strikeout team in the league against RHP, so there is no questioning the upside here. As always, the Angels present a bit of a good news / bad news situation with all their strikeouts but also a ton of power. What I like here is not just the strikeouts, but also the 50% ground balls and very limited hard contact from Brown against righties. You could choose to rank someone else ahead of him tonight, but for me, this is the SP1 in a no-salary cap world. On FD, there sort of is no salary cap, so I’ll be playing him first in my primary lineups. On DK, I just don’t know. $11,200 is a tough salary on a slate with Arizona in Coors Field and all the other spend-up bats we’re going to find. I’m not going to be able to determine how much Brown to use until we see what we find in the cheaper tier.

You know I love Zack Wheeler, and I would still consider him to be a better pitcher than Hunter Brown. They are both elite, but we have a longer track record along with the better control for Wheeler. We also have the steady pitch count from Wheeler that adds to his upside. The difference here is a far lower strikeout matchup than Brown, and with a similar amount of power risk. I will absolutely play both of them at some point, but assuming I can’t pair them together on DK, Wheeler is simply the fantastic leftover SP2.

Max Fried lacks the strikeout consistency of Brown and Wheeler, but he’s also basically just as elite of a real-life pitcher, and with innings upside that gives him more than enough DFS upside. The Orioles are a nonsensical wreck against lefties, ranking dead last in the league in both ISO and wOBA by a huge margin. They also strike out way too much, and adding in Fried’s ground balls, I really like him just about as much as Brown and Wheeler. This is just a tremendously loveable top three, and it’s kind of silly to pretend like we can guess which one will be better tonight. I’m going to side with matchups, leaving me with Brown and Fried ahead of Wheeler. On DK, where Fried is $1,200 cheaper than Brown, he’s a more realistic starting point as the SP1.

This is already too much to love to want to consider MacKenzie Gore against the Dodgers. Don’t get me wrong, Gore could absolutely mow down the Dodgers, or anyone, and if you want to play him, that’s fine. I just can’t use all these aces, and this matchup leaves Gore off the list.

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