Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 7/3

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-07-03 15:27:06 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! It’s kind of a bummer that we don’t have the Astros on this slate, so it’s not as easy to identify the bad chalk, but we press on! This slate leans much heavier to the hitting side, with only one spend-up pitcher in a tough matchup and then a big jumbled mess of okay pitchers.

It appears that we are going to be okay with the MLB weather tonight, so we can just wait for these MLB starting lineups to start rolling in. Lastly, be sure to note that the FD slate starts a little early at 6:45 PM ET, while the DK slate starts at the usual 7:07 PM ET.

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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

When I woke up way too early this morning, the pitching slate was okay, because we had Bryan Woo as a build-around piece and then could just look for one additional option on DK. But now, the Mariners have swapped him to tomorrow and replaced him with Logan Evans. This leaves things in a tough spot, with only Robbie Ray in a bad matchup at the top of the board. Now it’s not clear exactly where to draw the lines between tiers. For starters, I’ll split things at the $8,000 mark on DK and then again at the $7,000 mark, but really, it’s kind of all one big tangle.

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Robbie Ray at Diamondbacks – 27.5% K, 9.5% BB, 2.75 ERA, 3.65 SIERA
• Clarke Schmidt at Blue Jays – 23.9% K, 9.3% BB, 3.09 ERA, 4.09 SIERA
• Seth Lugo at Mariners – 21.6% K, 8% BB, 2.74 ERA, 4.10 SIERA
• David Peterson vs. Brewers – 20.6% K, 8.5% BB, 3.30 ERA, 3.85 SIERA

Robbie Ray continues to be more consistent than any version of him we’ve seen in years. However, with that, his strikeouts are also not spiking like they used to. For real-life purposes, I would definitely take this current version of Ray, but for DFS, in a horrific matchup for left-handed pitchers, I don’t love this at $10,000 on DK and $10,200 on FD. He’s always playable, but I cannot find any reason to prioritize him against Arizona.

This is the spot where we originally had Bryan Woo as a clear SP1, but now we’re left wondering if we’re supposed to pay up for Ray or if we can call one of these other things an SP1. Officially, I still don’t love spending up for Ray, but I’m certainly not willing to call anything else on this slate an SP1. So, you know what? We’re going to play two SP2’s today. Problem solved!

The next three pitchers as we move down below $9,000 on DK and below $10,000 on FD are Clarke Schmidt, Seth Lugo, and David Peterson.

Comparing Clarke Schmidt and Seth Lugo, while I would say Schmidt is the slightly better DFS pitcher with a tad more strikeout ability, the matchup and consistency swing this in the favor of Lugo.

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