Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 7/24

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-07-24 19:21:42 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? After looking at the slate, the Happy Thursday requires a question mark.

We have just a 4-game slate starting at 6:40 PM ET, and it’s one of those weird slates where there are no great pitching options and, somehow, also no great hitting options. But hey, it’s the same slate for all of us, and somebody has to win, so let’s dig in and see what we can find.

And don’t forget to check the MLB weather for tonight’s slate.

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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

On DK, we have one pitcher priced up at $9,500 and one down at $6,000, and then the other 6 pitchers are all bunched between $7,000-$8,300. I’m just going to list everyone all together in one big tier:

• Sonny Gray vs. Padres – 27.2% K, 4.2% BB, 4.04 ERA, 3.07 SIERA
• Yusei Kikuchi vs. Mariners – 24.4% K, 10.3% BB, 3.13 ERA, 4.11 SIERA
• Eric Lauer at Tigers – 27.1% K, 6.7% BB, 2.80 ERA, 3.44 SIERA
• Reese Olson vs. Blue Jays – 23.6% K, 8.9% BB, 2.71 ERA, 3.94 SIERA
• Jason Alexander vs. A’s – 15 IP this season
• Yu Darvish at Cardinals – 13 IP this season
• Logan Evans at Angels – 17% K, 7.7% BB, 3.81 ERA, 4.66 SIERA
• Luis Severino at Astros – 15.9% K, 7.6% BB, 5.10 ERA, 4.75 SIERA

Sonny Gray has the best skill set on this slate, but he comes with some pretty big question marks. When you look at his game log, what you find is a spread-out smattering of huge starts, but many more short outings with low pitch counts and low strikeouts. He has only reached 20 DK points once in his last 7 outings, although that one time was a slate-breaking 50-point game. If we ignore the disaster from last week, he’s still generally pretty ‘safe’ for something like a strikeout per inning with great control, and for raw points, that is probably all you need on this slate. With the way the Cardinals are babying his pitch count, I just can’t get excited about spending $9,500 for this guy in a low-strikeout matchup.

On FD, Yusei Kikuchi is priced next to Gray, but on DK, he gets a $1,200 discount. While his overall numbers are not as good, mostly due to the control, we’ve seen the same occasional spikes in strikeouts, and Kikuchi doesn’t have the same pitch count concerns. When you add an extra 15-20 pitches per start, Kikuchi’s strikeouts are just as good, if not better than Gray. It’s also a much higher strikeout matchup, so for me, Kikuchi is the SP1, even on FD where the salaries are similar.

Eric Lauer has been very similar to Sonny Gray, without the few huge outlier games. His skills are the best of his career, but he also has pitch count concerns. It appears as if the Jays have no interest in ever letting him pitch more than 6 innings, but on this slate, that should be plenty. His mediocre swinging-strike rate and Stuff+ numbers still imply to me that the 27% K rate is fluky high, but who knows, maybe this is just who he is. He’s also been weirdly much better against righties with a 30.6% K rate. Again, a 10% swinging-strike rate to righties implies there is no way he continues at 30%, but at the moment, it is what it is. Detroit is a very good team against lefties, currently ranking 5th in wOBA and wRC+, and 7th in ISO against LHP. They are about average in strikeouts, so it’s not a must-avoid matchup by any means, but I don’t love it. I think he’s fine, but I vastly prefer Kikuchi. Let’s see what else we find to decide where he lands in the group of SP2 options.

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