Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Friday 9/12

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-09-12 18:57:44 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 big 12-game slate that looks to have a lot of everything, with a lean to the pitching side. The highlight is Tarik Skubal in Miami, but with the way the salaries line up, we’re likely to see some pretty heavy chalk on Luis Castillo. Originally, it looked like we were going to have Dylan Cease against the Rockies, which would have been an even crazier level of chalk, but I am thrilled and honored to leave that with Cards to sort through tomorrow!

The glorious MLB weather continues for Kevin Roth, and I think he just threw a Green/Yellow on ARI/MIN just to let us know he’s still here!

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Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

This is a loaded pitching slate, with some elite aces up top and a huge mid-tier of good pitchers. There are a lot of places you could draw the lines based on salary, but I’m going with $9,500 and up in the top tier and then the slew of good mid-tier pitchers who are between $7,500-$9,000 on DK in the next tier. We still have more options once we get past that, so I’ll add everything below $7,500 into the cheaper tier. There are a few salary differences on FD, though they all end up fitting into essentially the same buckets.

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Tarik Skubal at Marlins – 32.6% K, 4.1% BB, 2.10 ERA, 2.65 SIERA
• Yoshinobu Yamamoto at Giants – 28.8% K, 8.1% BB, 2.72 ERA, 3.32 SIERA
• Jacob deGrom at Mets – 27.9% K, 5.8% BB, 2.78 ERA, 3.29 SIERA

Tarik Skubal is just better than everyone else, and he has a great matchup on top of that. This is simply going to be about salary with an extreme – but warranted – $12,000 price tag on DK and $11,000 on FD. When we get to the hitting side, we’re going to find a lot of spend-up bats that look kind of obvious. But there are also reasons not to love any of the offenses, and I also find several cheaper stacks with upside. In the lineups where I can afford Skubal, I’m not going to think about it for a second; I’m just going to play him and move on happily with my day.

On FD, Yoshinobu Yamamoto is only $400 cheaper than Skubal, and that is not enough. But on DK, we have a $2,000 salary gap, and that makes this very interesting. Yamamoto is not Skubal, but he’s been fantastic, and the strikeouts have ramped back up. I will just tell you that I am a little nervous that the 112 pitches in his near no-hitter last weekend could potentially be a bad thing for tonight. The Dodgers have been very generous with his pitch count, but in general, I’m always wary of them babying their arms. Because the games very much matter for the Dodgers, I’m going to assume he gets the same 90-100 pitches as always; I just wanted to mention that possibility. Now, if we assume the pitch count is safe, while I certainly don’t like his skills or the matchup as much as Skubal, I don’t think he needs to be $2,000 cheaper. I expect to have more Yamamoto than Skubal on DK.

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