Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 5/21

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2026-05-21 16:01:15 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 today. 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 May 21, 2026 MLB DFS slate.

Happy Thursday! We have a slow day with just a 4-game main slate starting at 6:40 PM ET. It’s a very tough slate to break down with a couple ace pitchers coming back from injury who have looked very shaky so far. There’s only one offense with a total over 4.5 runs, which will lead to some chalk and then a very spread-out slate beyond that. It looks like we are all clear on the weather front, so let’s jump on in and see what we find.

Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on DraftKings and FanDuel

If we remove the two pitchers who are basically long relievers in tough matchups, there are only six pitchers left on this slate. At first glance, I’d say all six are likely to get ownership, at least on DK, and it’s not immediately clear what the chalk is.

• Spencer Strider at Marlins – 31% K, 17.2% BB, 2.45 ERA, 4.31 SIERA
• Jose Soriano vs. A’s – 28% K, 10.9% BB, 2.41 ERA, 3.58 SIERA
• Sandy Alcantara vs. Braves – 16.9% K, 7.5% BB, 3.53 ERA, 4.39 SIERA
• Carlos Rodon vs. Blue Jays – 26.3% K, 21.1% BB, 5.63 ERA, 5.30 SIERA
• Eduardo Rodriguez vs. Rockies – 17.5% K, 9.9% BB, 2.53 ERA, 4.72 SIERA
• Luis Severino at Angels – 22.4% K, 12.9% BB, 4.45 ERA, 4.56 SIERA

This slate gets tricky immediately, with Spencer Strider only 3 starts back from injury and Carlos Rodon only 2 starts back from injury. As you can see from those numbers, both of them have struggled terribly with their control, but there’s also no way to know if that is just a very small sample size outlier as they shake off the rust. What we can say for sure is that if we could rewind the clock before their injuries, Strider would be the clear SP1 on this slate. But where we are at right now, Jose Soriano is the one pitcher here who has been an actual ace in the year 2026. However, even with Soriano’s amazing start to the season, he has started to morph back closer to his old self recently, and this leaves me scratching my head on this whole shebang. On a side note, I don’t feel like people use the word “shebang” enough anymore. Back in my day, we were using that word left and right. Shindig too. I don’t know how that relates to this slate, but I am going to find some sort of shindig to go to this weekend.

Through his first 5 starts of the year, Jose Soriano had an 0.28 ERA with 39 strikeouts in 32 innings, including 2 double-digit strikeout games. His control was still borderline, but he was getting more than enough strikeouts and good luck on batted balls to make up for it. Well, no, he has walked 13 batters in his last 22 innings, and while the strikeouts are still up from previous years, he’s been more good than great, with 4-7 strikeouts in each of his last 5 starts. It’s also noteworthy that in order to get those strikeouts up this season, his elite ground balls of the past have slipped to just a 47% GB rate to righties and a 56% GB rate to lefties. Essentially, I am just not sure who this guy is right now. I’m pretty sure he’s good, but I don’t know if he’s good from strikeout ability, or from ground balls, or some combination of both. And I can’t overlook the fact that he has 3+ walks in 6 of his 10 starts, including the horrifying 6 walks last weekend. On top of all that, this is a low strikeout matchup against an A’s team with a lot of power. Hmmm. It seems like he’s the SP1, but let’s move on and see what else we find, because I’m just a little wary here.

Spencer Strider has been great in 1 of his 3 starts and quite disappointing in the other 2. There are two big issues here – the walks and the velocity. He’s still throwing 95 mph, which is great, but when he was elite pre-injury, he was more in the 97-98 mph range. And, regardless of strikeouts and velocity, if you’re walking 17% of batters, you’re not going to be good. I have to think that the control is going to improve as he continues to work his way back, but it’s really anyone’s guess at this point. It’s a pretty good matchup, but at this moment, Strider is not a matchup-dependent pitcher. It’s simply a matter of whether he is improving towards his old self or if this inconsistent guy with bad control is the new normal. Folks, I would love to have an answer for you, but I do not. This is nothing but blind guessing until we get some more sample size on Strider.

My initial thought is…

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