Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 8/7

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-08-07 15:20:51 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 another very slow Thursday in MLB, with both sites running a 3-game main slate that starts at 4:10 PM ET. This is a pitching-heavy slate, with four pitchers who would be strong options on most full slates. This leaves us with a small pool of bats that should keep ownership congregated. I would be surprised if I have used the word “congregated” in an opening paragraph before, and there it was!

There is a moderate chance of some MLB weather issues with the MIA/ATL game, but unless things get far worse before lock, this is a non-issue to me.

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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

We have a great group of pitching options for such a small slate. At least the top four would be viable options on any slate, and even the cheap nonsense is not terrible for their salaries on DK. We can split them up into three pairs in their three different price ranges:

TOP TIER ACES

• Paul Skenes vs. Reds – 28.7% K, 6.3% BB, 2.02 ERA, 3.16 SIERA
• Logan Gilbert vs. White Sox– 35.4% K, 5.7% BB, 3.45 ERA, 2.46 SIERA

These are two of the best pitchers in the league, and they are both pitching in their helpful home ballparks in solid matchups. They are both consistent and have plenty of upside, although neither sees more than 6 innings on a regular basis, which means they don’t often hit the must-have ceiling where you can’t live without them at these salaries. Because it’s such a small slate, it’s quite possible that we don’t see any big scores from hitters, and in that scenario, you’d just want raw points from your pitchers regardless of salary. For that reason, I would not overthink it for a single second if you are able to afford these two aces together on DK. There is going to be ownership on the next two pitchers as well, so unless you just go with double cheap nonsense, nothing you do at pitcher is going to make you different enough to matter.

However, let’s assume you want to get at least a few of the big bats on this slate and can only afford one of these aces. The strikeout rate favors Gilbert, but he’s also been held pretty consistently under 90 pitches, and as great as he is, he hasn’t popped off for a lot of elite DFS performances. It’s basically the same for Skenes, who has the lower ERA thanks to silly low BABIP and HR/FB%. However, in the case of Skenes, you can very much make the case that he’s earning the good batted ball fortune, with one of the lowest barrel rates in the league and an ability to limit hard contact. Basically, I buy it enough that I consider Skenes to be a better pitcher than Gilbert even with that gap in K%. Let’s look at the matchups, using tonight’s projected lineups:

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