Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 8/13

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2026-08-13 14:00:07 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 August 13, 2026 MLB DFS slate.

Happy Thursday! We have an early start, with the main slate being a 6-gamer on both sites that starts at 1:10 PM ET. This is a slate with a very solid top tier of pitchers and not a single offense even within sniffing distance of a 5-run projected total to start the day. I can already tell you that I’m going to have a tough time separating the top 5 pitchers or getting overly excited about any of these offenses. But as always, we’re all playing with the same pool, so let’s dive in and see what we can figure out.

Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on DraftKings and FanDuel

We have a very good group of pitchers for such a small slate. The top 6 pitchers, who are all between $8,000 and $10,000 on both sites, all look playable, and almost all of the cheaper options look somewhat viable as well.

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Payton Tolle at Blue Jays – 28.5% K, 6.7% BB, 3.20 ERA, 3.31 SIERA
• Logan Gilbert at Yankees – 26.4% K, 5.8% BB, 3.42 ERA, 3.43 SIERA
• Parker Messick at Tigers – 25.1% K, 7% BB, 2.57 ERA, 3.62 SIERA
• Max Fried vs. Mariners – 24% K, 8% BB, 2.88 ERA, 3.80 SIERA
• Braxton Ashcraft at Marlins – 26.6% K, 5.9% BB, 4.08 ERA, 3.32 SIERA
• Kevin Gausman at Nationals – 23.1% K, 6.5% BB, 4.29 ERA, 3.86 SIERA

Payton Tolle already looked like arguably the best pitcher on this slate before he went out and had a career game with 14 strikeouts against the A’s last week. That was kind of a best-case-scenario matchup for his strikeouts, and we certainly can’t expect anything like that again here against a much higher-contact Blue Jays lineup. However, we’ve seen his strikeouts be pretty consistently good even in tougher matchups, and what the Blue Jays lack in strikeouts, they make up for with low power. With his 32.7% K rate against righties this season, Tolle looks worthy of being the SP1, but let’s see what else we find.

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