Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 4/24

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-04-24 14:59:39 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! We’ve got another slow Thursday, with the main slate being a 4-gamer starting early at 1:10 p.m. ET. There are some weather concerns in the CWS/MIN game, but with only 4 games on the slate, I’m going to play that one unless it worsens from its starting point of Yellow/Orange on the MLB weather page.

There is also a very late night 3-game slate on DK at the magical start time of 9:29 p.m. ET, and then a 4-game FD slate that starts at 6:45 p.m.. We will have Expert Tags for those later slates in the MLB DFS optimizer.

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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

This is a very good pitching slate for only 4 games. We have two top aces in good matchups who would be top-of-the-board plays on any slate, two solid mid-tier options, and even some cheap nonsense that would make the list on a lot of slates.

• Garrett Crochet vs. Mariners – 34% K, 6% BB, 3.13 ERA, 2.64 SIERA
• Cole Ragans vs. Rockies – 30.3% K, 8.4% BB, 3.20 ERA, 3.31 SIERA
• Landen Roupp vs. Brewers – 24.5% K, 11% BB, 3.73 ERA, 3.95 SIERA
• Bryan Woo at Red Sox – 21.4% K, 3.3% BB, 2.93 ERA, 3.76 SIERA
• Chris Paddack vs. White Sox – 20.3% K, 6.5% BB, 5.37 ERA, 4.22 SIERA
• Shane Smith at Twins – 16.7% K, 8.9% BB, 2.82 ERA, 4.68 SIERA
• German Marquez at Royals – 14.4% K, 12.4% BB, 7.97 ERA, 5.39 SIERA

Garrett Crochet and Cole Ragans are two of the best DFS pitchers in the league and they both have high-strikeout matchups. However, this is clearly a better spot for Ragans, in addition to the fact that he has been the more dominant of the two so far this season with a 36.8% K rate. Colorado’s strikeout rate remains obscene against lefties, while Seattle is a little bit better against lefties and also has more power. I’m about to tell you that you should just play both of them, as should be obvious, but let’s start by saying that if you can only afford one of them, I’d be going with Cole Ragans. I think this will be what everyone does, but even as heavy chalk, this is a Don’t Overthink It.

We are about to find some decent, cheaper options, so it’s somewhat tempting to go with a cheaper SP2 on DK. However, we are then going to find a slate with very little offense worth spending up on. With that in mind, as well as knowing that some portion of the field will be going cheaper, I just want to play the two super aces who could break the slate. The most realistic ‘worst-case scenario’ is that one of Crochet and Ragans has an off day, and a pitcher in the $7,000-$8,000 range outscores them by a few points. With the state of the bats on this slate, I would say whoop-dee-doo. While anything can happen, the chances of Crochet and Ragans getting massively outscored are very slim.

If you do feel the need to go cheaper, and at some point I’ll get there as well, my preference is with Landen Roupp over Bryan Woo. Roupp has ramped his strikeouts all the way up to a Crochet-like 31.2% through 4 starts this season, and while I’m not sure I buy into that level, there is clearly something very good going on here. His 15.5% swinging strikes say it’s not fluky, and the strikeouts have shown up in bunches in 3 of his 4 starts. I think there’s a good chance that he is better than an $8,200 pitcher on DK and than an $8,900 pitcher on FD. If salary really mattered on this slate, I would be more intrigued about playing Roupp ahead of Crochet, but because it doesn’t, I’m still factoring in the unknown with Roupp’s skill set and the far tougher strikeout matchup. Roupp is the SP3, and my first guy in if I can’t quite fit the double aces.

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