Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Friday 9/4

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood)

Created Sep 4, 2026

Last Updated 2026-09-04 16:24:28 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 September 4, 2026 MLB DFS slate.

Happy Friday! We close out the week with a very tricky 12-game slate on DK, which is an 11-gamer on FD. FD is not including Game 2 of the DET/CLE doubleheader, but that is not an extremely important game on this slate anyway. At first glance, while the Coors Field game tops the board, I’d say this looks like an extremely loaded offensive slate that will be very tough to narrow down to a manageable pool. On the pitching side, I spy some Snelly chalk but not a lot of great pivots off of it. Let’s dive in and see what we find.

Friday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on DraftKings and FanDuel

There are a handful of good pitchers on this slate, but I’d say it’s a pretty small pool overall, and I expect that to lead to some pretty heavy chalk with two pitchers up top. After the top three pitchers, it’s not immediately clear where to draw the line between tiers, but we’ll start here:

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Blake Snell vs. Nationals – 33% K, 11% BB, 2.42 ERA, 3.30 SIERA
• Nolan McLean vs. Giants – 26.7% K, 9.5% BB, 3.06 ERA, 3.76 SIERA
• Logan Gilbert vs. A’s – 26% K, 6.3% BB, 3.42 ERA, 3.52 SIERA
• Shota Imanaga at Marlins – 24% K, 5.7% BB, 4.01 ERA, 3.73 SIERA
• Ranger Suarez at Orioles – 23.1% K, 7.6% BB, 3.64 ERA, 3.91 SIERA
• Foster Griffin vs. Tigers (DK) – 22.1% K, 6.2% BB, 3.21 ERA, 3.88 SIERA

Blake Snell has the highest upside among pitchers on this slate with a 34.1% K rate in his 4 starts since coming off the IL. He has reached double-digit strikeouts in 2 of those 4 starts, and he got up to a season-high 99 pitches in his last outing. There is no need to question that there is a ceiling here that no one else on this slate can match. At the same time, this is still a guy with an 11% walk rate who has made an entire career out of up-and-down performances that are completely unpredictable. This is generally the kind of pitcher that I love to play anytime he’s low-owned, or any time he’s cheap. Well, tonight, he’s definitely not cheap, and I am guessing he’s not going to be low-owned. That doesn’t take him out of my pool, but it does make me want to see if we can find some other options. Matchup is barely relevant for Snell, but to whatever extent it does matter, I’d say it adds to Snell’s boom-or-bust nature. The Nationals have plenty of strikeouts in the lineup, but they also have 6 batters above a 9% walk rate and 7 batters above a .160 ISO against lefties. Let’s see what else we find on this slate, but my initial lean is simply to say that I don’t ever love a chalky $11,000 Snell.

The strikeouts have taken a pretty serious downturn for…

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