Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Monday 5/18

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2026-05-18 16:37:43 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 give you his musings on the May 18, 2026 MLB DFS slate.

Happy Monday! We kick off the week with a good-looking 9-game slate that has a bunch of everything. We have good pitchers, we have Coors Field, we have a Wrigley wind game, and we have reasonable options in all different pricing tiers for both pitching and hitting. We also have some MLB weather to keep an eye on, with both the BOS/KC and HOU/MIN games having some risk. For now, I’ll assume everything plays, and hopefully we’ll have a better idea on those spots closer to lock.

Monday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on DraftKings and FanDuel

We have 9 pitchers who are priced above $8,000 on both sites, and I’m going to separate them into two groups. There is not much gap in salary, but both sites have the same top 5, so we can compare apples slightly more to apples today than what we get on a lot of slates. After those top two groups, things get very dicey in a hurry.

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Yoshinobu Yamamoto at Padres – 24.6% K, 5.1% BB, 3.60 ERA, 3.37 SIERA
• Shota Imanaga vs. Brewers – 28% K, 6.2% BB, 2.32 ERA, 3.16 SIERA
• Bryan Woo vs. White Sox – 22.3% K, 4.7% BB, 3.91 ERA, 3.88 SIERA
• Michael King vs. Dodgers -24.4% K, 10.7% BB, 2.63 ERA, 3.98 SIERA
• Ryan Weathers vs. Blue Jays – 29.8% K, 7.2% BB, 3.00 ERA, 3.00 SIERA

The first thing I’m doing here is cutting Michael King out of the pool. He’s been quite good this season, and his skills are in the same range as everyone else here, but I’m not going to pick on the Dodgers unless it comes with a clearly better skill set or significant savings.

The one player where the salaries split is with Bryan Woo. Woo is only $700 cheaper than Yamamoto on DK, while he’s at a $1,600 discount on FD. The overall numbers this season are a little disappointing for Woo, but he has looked back to full strength in his last 2 starts, both with 9 strikeouts in 6 innings. Everything under the hood looks the same as last season when he had a 27.1% K rate, 2.94 ERA, and 3.30 SIERA. That strikeout rate was probably a little elevated, but I am confident that what we have here is a pitcher with above-average strikeouts and elite control. Home runs to lefties may continue to be an issue, so the two big White Sox lefties could certainly do some damage, but a couple solo homers aren’t going to ruin anything. Because the White Sox can get mostly left-handed, I’m not expecting another 9-strikeout game here from Woo, but I am expecting another quality start with moderate upside. That makes him my salary-adjusted SP1 on FD.

On DK…

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