Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 4/17

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-04-17 15:24:43 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. 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 Thursday! As we will continue to see, Thursdays are a day with unusual schedules and games spread out all over the place. The main slate is the same for both sites and once again starts earlier than usual at 6:35 PM ET.

There is also an early 4-game slate that starts at 12:10 PM ET, and as always, we’ll have Expert tags and analysis in our MLB DFS optimizer for those games. And according to Kevin Roth on our MLB weather page, there is also some concern on that early slate with the ATH/CWS game starting as Yellow/Orange, so be sure to keep an eye on that. That is especially relevant since the A’s are the top offense on the slate.

In general, I will only have early-slate write-ups when there are 5+ games, but since the main slate is only 5 games, I’m going to add a little Cliff Notes version for the early 4-game slate. Just for you. Yes, you.

Editor’s Note: Looking for more places to play? Check out our Sleeper promo code and PrizePicks promo code, two of the best DFS apps available today.

Thursday Early Slate Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

Essentially every pitcher on this early slate looks viable, and similar to last night, none of them look like any sort of must-play.

We originally had Bryan Woo on this slate, but he was pushed back and replaced with Emerson Hancock. That leaves us with two clear top pitchers, Brady Singer and Eduardo Rodriguez. Singer has the good strikeout matchup but also comes with some power risk in his hitter-friendly ballpark. The matchup for Rodriguez is not quite as good for strikeouts, but it is much better for power prevention with both the matchup and ballpark. Ideally, I’d just play them both on DK, but if I can only have one, I give the very small lean to Rodriguez. Both have occasional upside, and I’ll just let the ballpark and matchup dictate my choice here.

Want to read more? Sign up for Premium!