Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Thursday 5/22

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-05-22 20:32:43 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! As usual, we have a slow day with just 9 games sprinkled all throughout the day. The main slate is a 5-gamer that looks almost certain to turn into a 4-gamer with a straight RED on the MLB weather page in the BAL/BOS game. I will be leaving that game out of the analysis and just looking at the remaining 4 games.

If you’re playing the early slate, we’ll have some expert tags and analysis available in the MLB DFS optimizer to help you get pointed in the right direction.

Editor’s Note: Looking for more places to play? Check out our Sleeper promo code and PrizePicks promo code, two of the best DFS apps available today.

Thursday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

Since we have such a small slate, I’ll just look at all 8 pitchers tonight. They are split right down the middle, with four borderline aces priced at $7,800-$9,800 on DK and then four cheap darts priced at $7,000 and below.

TOP TIER QUARTET

• Jack Flaherty vs. Guardians – 28.9% K, 7.7% BB, 4.44 ERA, 3.24 SIERA
• AJ Smith-Shawver at Nationals – 24.8% K, 10.6% BB, 2.33 ERA, 3.98 SIERA
• Tanner Bibee at Tigers – 16.4% K, 8% BB, 4.06 ERA, 4.68 SIERA
• George Kirby at Astros – 1st start of season

The easiest thing to start with here is just crossing George Kirby off the list for the primary pool. If he were getting a full workload, I’d be happy to consider him in the race for SP1, but this is his first start of the season coming back from a shoulder injury, and he got up to just 64 pitches in his last rehab start. I would be stunned if they push him too far in this first start, and because he didn’t get any discount for the injury, I’m just going to wait until he gets stretched out.

That leaves Jack Flaherty and AJ Smith-Shawver duking it out for SP1. Flaherty has the much longer track record, as well as the better skills so far this season. He has been hit around a bit recently with 4-5 runs allowed in 3 of his last 4 starts, but it just looks like a random fluke to me. He has double-digit swinging strikes in every single start this season, and the lack of strikeouts in the Cleveland lineup is balanced out by a lack of power. I can make a case for Smith-Shawver ahead of him, but because of the salary gap due to the early season ERA, Flaherty is the easy SP1 for me on both sites tonight.

If you have the salary, I will make the same case for AJ Smith-Shawver that I did yesterday before the PPD. While he’s been very lucky on batted balls, the strikeouts have been consistent, and while it’s a small sample, his splits since last season with 96 PA against lefties and 92 PA against righties are pretty wild:

Smith-Shawver vs. RHB – 17.4% K, 12% BB, .128 ISO, .365 wOBA
Smith-Shawver v. LHB – 30.2% K, 8.3% BB, .092 ISO, .228 wOBA

The Nationals likely send up at least 6-7 lefties, so even if these numbers are not actually that extreme, I have to call it a plus matchup. I do prefer Flaherty, but Smith-Shawver is the SP2, and if salary doesn’t matter, I’ll be playing these two together on DK.

Want to read more? Sign up for Premium!