Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 8/14

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-08-14 18:00:41 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 have a slower day, with just a 5-game slate that begins at 6:40 PM ET. For such a small slate, we certainly have no shortage of obvious upside with Tarik Skubal on the mound and the Diamondbacks heading into Coors Field to face the dreadful Rockies pitching staff. Ownership would play a big part in these matchups even on a bigger slate, and tonight, we are really going to need to consider whether we want to play the obvious best plays with everyone else or play something worse just to be different.

Potentially making things even trickier, the DET/MIN game, which features the aforementioned Skubal, starts the day at Orange/Yellow on the MLB weather page. For now, I’ll do the analysis as if it plays cleanly, but obviously, everything about this slate changes if that worsens later in the day.

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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

Tarik Skubal is certainly in his own tier both for talent and pricing, but then everything else is bunched up enough that I’m just going to list all of the viable pitchers together in one bucket:

• Tarik Skubal at Twins – 33.8% K, 3.8% BB, 2.35 ERA, 2.44 SIERA
• Jesus Luzardo at Nationals – 26.8% K, 8% BB, 4.20 ERA, 3.56 SIERA
• Kodai Senga vs. Braves – 22.5% K, 12% BB, 2.30 ERA, 4.56 SIERA
• Edward Cabrera at Guardians – 25.7% K, 7.9% BB, 3.08 ERA, 3.62 SIERA
• Tanner Bibee vs. Marlins – 21.5% K, 7.1% BB, 4.60 ERA, 4.06 SIERA
• Bailey Ober vs. Tigers – 18.2% K, 5.3% BB, 5.16 ERA, 4.63 SIERA
• Eduardo Rodriguez at Rockies – 21.9% K, 8.8% BB, 5.68 ERA, 4.33 SIERA
• Brad Lord vs. Phillies – 20.1% K, 8% BB, 3.28 ERA, 3.93 SIERA

If the weather holds up, the only question on Tarik Skubal is whether or not you can afford him. If you really wanted to make the case to fade him based on having a couple dicey starts recently, go ahead, but he is so much better than everyone else that I think that’s silly. If we were playing DFS with no salary cap at pitcher, there is no point at which I would fade Skubal for ownership, so it’s really just about the salary. My initial thought is that DK did a fantastic job pricing him so far ahead of the other pitchers that, when adding in the salaries on Arizona and the few other high-end bats to spend on, the decision is not clear. On FD, we still have a sizeable gap between Skubal and everyone other than Luzardo, but it’s less extreme, so I’m planning to play Skubal there. Let’s move on and see what we find with the cheaper pitchers and then reevaluate Skubal.

Jesus Luzardo appears to have settled down, and the control has been good in his last few starts. The strikeouts have not spiked above 7 in quite awhile, and there are some ups and downs, but when the control is there, he can pick up easy innings to make up for it.

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