Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Tuesday 5/13

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-05-13 18:30:20 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 Tuesday! We have a manageable 10-game slate that looks pretty evenly balanced with good pitching and hitting options. It also appears that all of tonight’s MLB weather concerns are in the earlier games, so we should be clear for the main slate.

I have an unusually clear view of how I plan to attack this slate at first glance, but let’s dig in and see if anything changes.

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.

Tuesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

We have an interesting pitching slate, starting with 10 pitchers priced at $8,000+ on DK. The pricing follows a pretty similar line for FD as well, with these being 10 of the 11 most expensive pitchers. A first glance at this list with the salaries tells me that the pricing algorithms are overreacting to early-season ERA, leaving us with some pretty easy choices. But let’s dig in and see if that turns out to be the case.

A TEN PACK OF ACES

• Max Fried at Mariners – 22.6% K, 5.3% BB, 1.05 ERA, 3.47 SIERA
• Kris Bubic at Astros – 24.2% K, 7.2% BB, 1.69 ERA, 3.59 SIERA
• Kodai Senga vs. Pirates – 23% K, 11.2% BB, 1.16 ERA, 4.28 SIERA
• Bryan Woo vs. Yankees – 25.3% K, 4.6% BB, 3.25 ERA, 3.34 SIERA
• Framber Valdez vs. Royals – 22.4% K, 8.7% BB, 3.94 ERA, 3.73 SIERA
• Dylan Cease vs. Angels – 27% K, 9.6% BB, 4.91 ERA, 3.67 SIERA
• Spencer Schwellenbach vs. Nationals – 22.2% K, 4.6% BB, 3.42 ERA, 3.36 SIERA
• Robbie Ray vs. Diamondbacks – 25.4% K, 12.7% BB, 2.84 ERA, 4.23 SIERA
• Shane Baz at Blue Jays – 24.5% K, 8.6% BB, 4.93 ERA, 3.78 SIERA
• Brandon Pfaadt at Giants – 21% K, 5.1% BB, 3.28 ERA, 3.73 SIERA

Folks, today is a bit unusual for me in the way I’m seeing this slate. When we have this many top pitchers, I rarely end up with an easily narrowed-down list, but that’s exactly what I have. I will just tell you right from the start that because we have so many good pitchers, you could absolutely just play all of them or play the ownership game and pick out whichever ones everyone else is fading. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’ll walk you through my thought process a little bit here to get to where I’m going.

Max Fried, Kris Bubic, and Kodai Senga all have ERAs below 1.70 to start the season. You know the best term to describe the usefulness of ERA through 7-8 starts? That’s right – whoop-dee-doo!

That doesn’t mean that Fried, Bubic, and Senga aren’t all great pitchers or that they can’t be the best pitchers on this slate, but in this case, when I look at all the underlying metrics, these three are more in the same big group with everyone else and not standing out ahead of it.

I love Max Fried, I think he’s an elite real-life pitcher who is also a very good DFS pitcher. But I simply don’t feel any need to pay this premium for a guy with simply average strikeouts on this kind of slate.

I also love Kris Bubic, and I think he’s a fully legit ace, but just like with Fried, I don’t think I need the 2nd-most-expensive pitcher on the slate when he doesn’t stand out from the guys who are more than $1,000 cheaper.

Kodai Senga? Rinse and repeat. He’s good, but he’s the 3rd-highest-priced pitcher on DK and 4th on FD, and only Robbie Ray can rival his nonsense control. All these guys are totally playable, and any one of them could put up the highest score on the slate; it just seems totally unnecessary to spend on any of them.

Bryan Woo is the other one where it feels unnecessary to spend for the 3rd- or 4th-highest-priced pitcher when he’s facing the Yankees and is a similar pitcher to cheaper options.

So that’s step one. You can play any of those four; they are all great. I just don’t think we need them.

Want to read more? Sign up for Premium!