Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Monday 4/14

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-04-14 17:15:13 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 Monday! We start the week with an 8-game slate at the usual 7:05 p.m. ET start time. At first glance it appears to be pitcher-heavy, although not quite as can’t-miss as yesterday’s loaded pitching slate. That also leaves us with a fairly condensed pool of top-tier offenses, led by the Dodgers. Another thing I notice immediately are some big price discrepancies between the sites when I look at the MLB DFS optimizer . This may end up as a slate where my lineups look significantly different on DK as compared to FD, but let’s dig in and see what we find.

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Monday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

There are seven pitchers priced above $8k on DK, and we’ll use that as the dividing line for the top tier. At first glance, Tarik Skubal looks like a bit of a standout, but then it’s all pretty jumbled.

• Tarik Skubal at Brewers – 29.7% K, 4.7% BB, 2.50 ERA, 2.93 SIERA
• Dylan Cease vs. Cubs – 29.2% K, 8.6% BB, 3.79 ERA, 3.45 SIERA
• Joe Ryan vs. Mets – 26.9% K, 3.8% BB, 3.49 ERA, 3.25 SIERA
• Framber Valdez at Cardinals – 24.5% K, 8% BB, 2.87 ERA, 3.39 SIERA
• Sonny Gray vs. Astros – 30.3% K, 5.6% BB, 3.90 ERA, 2.99 SIERA
• Shane Baz vs. Red Sox – 23% K, 8.4% BB, 2.83 ERA, 4.11 SIERA
• Dustin May vs. Rockies – 11 IP since 2023

The most consistent ace on this slate is Tarik Skubal. My only ‘concern’ is that he is the kind of elite ace who is pretty much always very good but rarely posts must-have DFS scores. He’s more of the guy who just goes 6-7 innings with 7-8 strikeouts every time, instead of the guy who gives you double-digit strikeouts or 120-pitch outings. On this particular slate, while it’s possible, I don’t think it’s likely that anyone gives us that silly 15-K outing that you can’t win without. So, just take the consistency of Skubal as the SP1 if you can afford it. At $10,500 on DK and $10,300 on FD, I think he’s a great play, but assuming he is the heavy chalk, at least on DK, I’m hoping to find some pivots rather than trying to match the field here. Let’s see what we find as we dig through things.

Dylan Cease looks like the biggest wild card on this slate. He has as much strikeout upside as anyone, but he faces a dangerous opponent, and he’s coming off a start where he allowed a stunning 9 runs in 4 innings. In his 3 starts this year, he has a 27.3% K rate and 9.1% walks with 18.2% swinging strikes and the same velocity as last season. He was obviously off in his last start, but there’s also just a lot of random fluke in a .563 BABIP when everything else looks fine. What I’m going to say here is that I still think he’s a tad overpriced on DK due to the matchup, but he’s clearly underpriced on FD at just $8,400. I’m playing Skubal way ahead of him on DK, but on FD, he is going to be my highest-owned pitcher.

Joe Ryan has looked real-life fantastic with a single walk allowed in 3 starts this season, but he also doesn’t have the strikeouts going yet, with just a 23.4% K rate and 9.6% swinging strikes. He is not throwing as hard as he did last season, although it’s also worth noting that his velocity in 2024 was a career outlier, and where he’s sitting right now is the same as he was every season prior to 2024, when he still had the same strikeout ability. What we know for sure is that he has elite control and allows a lot of fly balls. This means he will go wherever HR/FB takes him. This Mets team certainly has the power to beat him, but also about an average strikeout rate. When his strikeouts come back, which I expect they will, he’s far more dominant against righties, and most likely, he sees 5 righties tonight. This all leaves me thinking he is priced exactly where he should be, which makes him playable in any format on either site, but also not a priority. I wish I had a stronger stance on him one way or another, but I just don’t.

Framber Valdez is up near 30% strikeouts through 3 starts, though over the long run, he’s not in the Skubal, Cease, Ryan tier of strikeout ability. But we’ve also seen plenty of stretches like this where he can be dominant for weeks at a time, and regardless of where his strikeouts land, he always has the ground balls. When I look at this matchup with the projected St. Louis lineup, I see 5 high-strikeout bats and very little power risk. There is not a single batter in the Cardinals lineup who has even a 9% barrel rate against lefties since the start of last season. The pricing on Valdez is the opposite of what we saw with Cease, where FD overshot his salary up at $10,700, but DK has him down at $8,800. He’s out of the primary pool on FD, while on DK, I like him ahead of Cease and Ryan.

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