Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 6/12

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-06-12 14:50:32 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’ve got a slow day on the diamond, with just a 4-game main slate on DK (7:40 PM ET start) and a 5-game main slate on FD (6:35 PM ET). Even though it’s a difference of only one game, the slate changes dramatically on FD with the addition of Tarik Skubal to the pool, but both slates have a couple of good pitching options and not a ton to get excited about on the offensive side.

There are also three early games, and if you are going to be playing that early 1:10 PM ET slate, we’ll have some Expert tags and analysis in our MLB DFS optimizer, LineupHQ, to help get you started.

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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

As noted above, this pitching slate is completely different between the two sites with the addition of Tarik Skubal to the FD slate. We also have more of a salary difference with an intriguing prospect for Milwaukee. I’m going to split things into two small buckets:

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Tarik Skubal at Orioles (FD only) – 33.4% K, 2.2% BB, 2.16 ERA, 2.22 SIERA
• Framber Valdez vs. White Sox – 25.1% K, 8.1% BB, 3.07 ERA, 3.24 SIERA
• Sonny Gray at Brewers – 26.5% K, 4.6% BB, 3.35 ERA, 3.12 SIERA

As we’ll discuss, I really do like Framber Valdez and Sonny Gray, but they just aren’t in the same class as Tarik Skubal. Skubal has the best K-BB% of any pitcher in the league, and he continues to pile up easy innings with endless upside. I still think that, in general, he’s more likely to give you the 7-9 strikeout type of starts than the massive ceiling games, but he’s already had 4 starts of 11+ strikeouts, and even when he’s not that elite, he’s still fantastic. The Orioles are a far better matchup for left-handed pitchers, currently ranking dead last in the league in ISO and wOBA against LHP. Skubal is expensive, but he should be. I’m going out of my way to play him ahead of Valdez and Gray on FD and basically just fading him in the few lineups where I need spend-up bats (in which case I’ll jump down to the cheaper tier).

On DK, we don’t have Skubal, so the choice for SP1 is between Valdez and Gray.

Framber Valdez is always likely to pitch deep into games, with easy innings from all of his ground balls, and this season, we’ve seen plenty of his upside, with 7 starts of 7+ strikeouts. The White Sox are a higher-strikeout team against LHP, and they also don’t get nearly as many walks as they do against RHP.

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