Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Tuesday 5/20

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-05-20 18:12:17 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’ve got an 11-game slate that has the potential to turn into a 10-game slate, or possibly even 9, depending on the weather in Minnesota and Chicago. For now, I’m assuming the CLE/MIN game is not playable with an Orange/Red rating to start the day on our MLB weather page. We also have an Orange with the SEA/CWS game, so while I’m including bats from that game for now, we need to keep an eye out there as the day progresses.

On the field, we have very obvious elite high-end plays on both the pitching and hitting side. The trick is not finding something to love; it’s deciding where you’re going to allocate that precious salary cap that dries up too quickly tonight.

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Tuesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

This is a tricky pitching slate, with the salaries appropriately spread out to reflect the massive gaps in talent level. It’s also a slate where we have a lot of high-end offense to love, making it even tougher to decide whether or not to spend up for these top-dollar aces. I’m going to split things into a few smaller buckets with the top tiers to reflect these gaps.

TWO TOP TIER ACES

• Tarik Skubal at Cardinals – 33.6% K, 2.8% BB, 2.67 ERA, 2.25 SIERA
• Yoshinobu Yamamoto vs. Diamondbacks – 29.6% K, 8% BB, 2.12 ERA, 2.85 SIERA

For the past 2 seasons, Tarik Skubal has been in the discussion for best pitcher in the league with no flaws in his skill set. But he’s also been one of those guys who has not always been worth an extreme DFS salary. He’s generally more about consistent, trustable performances, but without a lot of huge spikes that leave you with must-have DFS performances. In 2024, he made 31 starts, and only three of them reached double-digit strikeouts. Well, 2025 Skubal already has three double-digit strikeout games in his last 4 outings, and his swinging strike rate has gone up from a great 14.6% last year to a stunning 18.9% this season. His Stuff+ numbers have gone through the roof, and his velocity is at a career high. It’s still early, but it’s absolutely possible that he has hit a new level, where he does start to give us those must-have DFS starts more often. Matchup has not mattered one teeny tiny iota, and the Cardinals are no better than any of the teams he’s been mowing down recently. Officially, my best guess, partly with adding in his not quite elite pitch counts, is that he doesn’t continue to rack up double-digit strikeouts in the majority of his starts. But even if he doesn’t, it’s still very likely that his ‘mediocre’ starts are still something like 6 innings with 7-9 strikeouts and no walks. He’s the best pitcher on this slate by a wide margin; it’s just a matter of if we can afford him. On FD, I don’t think he’s priced up quite enough even at $11,000, so he’s my SP1 there. On DK, $11,500 is a lot, and I think I need to wait and see what else we find before making a determination. But, no matter what else we find, if you can afford him, play him.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto has really taken a big step back over his last 4 starts, and he has a more difficult matchup than Skubal. This is another great pitcher, but to me, there is too big a gap between these aces to even consider Yamamoto other than just being different for the sake of being different. In an outlier scenario, sure, he could outscore Skubal tonight, but the chances of that are low enough that I’m just playing Skubal or going cheaper.

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