Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 8/21

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-08-21 14:16:27 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 games spread out all over the place today, leading to a bit of a mess between the sites. I’m going to focus on the early 6-game DK slate that starts at 1:10 PM ET. At the very end of the article, I will add a Cliff Notes version of the main FD slate, which is a 5-game slate starting at 4:05 PM ET. There is also a later 3-game DK slate that starts at 7:15 PM ET, and we’ll have Expert tags and analysis for that slate in our MLB DFS optimizer, LineupHQ.

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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

This is a pretty solid group of pitchers for a smaller slate, and it seems likely that we’ll have some pretty heavy chalk with Dylan Cease up top.

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Dylan Cease vs. Giants – 30% K, 9.8% BB, 4.61 ERA, 3.51 SIERA
• Shota Imanaga vs. Brewers – 21.1% K, 4.7% BB, 3.06 ERA, 4.29 SIERA
• MacKenzie Gore vs. Mets – 28.3% K, 8.4% BB, 4.04 ERA, 3.52 SIERA
• Quinn Priester at Cubs – 19.4% K, 7.8% BB, 3.48 ERA, 3.92 SIERA
• Sean Manaea at Nationals – 27% K, 5.1% BB, 4.78 ERA, 3.29 SIERA

Dylan Cease has not been the slightest bit consistent this season, but he still has more ups than downs and the highest strikeout rate on this slate. He is bound to be extreme chalk, so because he sometimes decides to walk 5+ batters, you can always make a case to fade if you want. But I don’t see any reasonable case to make besides calling him the SP1. The Giants should have 5-6 high-strikeout bats in the lineup, and with Cease having a K rate over 29% to both sides of the plate this season, he has a huge ceiling. And while it’s disheartening to see 6 walks in his last game, that is still an outlier to the bad side, and more often, he’s going to walk 2 or 3 batters to go along with more than a strikeout per inning. I’m most likely on board with Cease chalk, but let’s see what the pivots are.

Before we get to the more direct salary pivots off of Cease, let’s talk about the other chalky pitcher, Sean Manaea. Manaea is cheaper than the 3 other spend-ups, down at just $8,100 in a favorable matchup. He has been very solid in his 32 innings since coming off the IL, but his pitch count appears to be stuck in the 85-90 range.

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