Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 5/15

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-05-15 13:15:42 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! We’ve got a very light day of baseball, with just 6 games spread throughout the day. The main slate is just a 4-gamer starting super early at 12:15 PM ET. That means it’s almost time to start thinking about lunch already! But let’s start with some coffee and a look through this dreadful pitching slate.

With 3 of the 4 games starting early, it’s possible we won’t get the last two lineups in before lock, but other than that, we should start to see MLB starting lineups coming in nice and early today.

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Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

This is a very bad pitching slate, but hey, it’s bad for everyone. Rather than breaking things up into tiers that barely exist, I’ll just list all 8 starting pitchers:

• Kevin Gausman vs. Rays – 22.9% K, 6.9% BB, 3.97 ERA, 3.86 SIERA
• Zack Littell at Blue Jays – 16% K, 4.8% BB, 4.40 ERA, 4.45 SIERA
• AJ Smith-Shawver vs. Nationals – 24.6% K, 10.9% BB, 2.76 ERA, 4.06 SIERA
• Nick Martinez vs. White Sox – 20% K, 5.9% BB, 4.23 ERA, 4.09 SIERA
• Tomoyuki Sugano vs. Twins – 14.2% K, 4.4% BB, 2.72 ERA, 4.47 SIERA
• Chris Paddack at Orioles – 17.6% K, 9.4% BB, 4.76 ERA, 4.87 SIERA
• Trevor Williams at Braves – 18.3% K, 6.5% BB, 5.88 ERA, 4.27 SIERA
• Bryse Wilson at Reds – 12.7% K, 10.3% BB, 4.88 ERA, 5.30 SIERA

At first glance, I would say there are three pitchers who appear to be a little ahead of this silly pack today: Kevin Gausman, AJ Smith-Shawver, and Nick Martinez. This is a super unexciting ‘top three,’ but everyone is playing with the same options.

The race for SP1 really comes down to Gausman vs. Smith-Shawver.

Based on long-term stats and name recognition, the only pitcher on this slate that even sort of resembles an ace is Kevin Gausman. But ace is a generous term for a guy who hasn’t been above a 23% K rate since 2023. We’ve seen the strikeouts spike in just 2 of his 8 starts this season, and while I’m still hopeful he gets back to his old level, at this moment, I just have to view him as an average-strikeout pitcher. On this weak slate, average is perfectly good enough when combining with good control and a decent matchup.

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