Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Wednesday 4/16

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-04-16 16:17:58 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 Wednesday! We have the typical Wednesday with games spread around throughout the day. This is leaving us with a 10-game main slate that starts a little earlier than usual at 6:35 PM ET. There is also an earlier 4-game slate at 1:07 PM ET, for which we’ll have Expert tags and analysis in our MLB DFS optimizer, LineupHQ.

I just wanted to touch briefly on one note for this early slate before moving on to the main slate analysis. The Braves are getting Spencer Strider back today after a year-long absence. Pre-injury, Strider was the best DFS pitcher in the league, with a career 37% strikeout rate, which dwarfs any pitcher on this, or any other, slate. Of course there are a lot of question marks as to if he’ll immediately be in top form and what kind of leash he will have, but based on his last rehab start of 90 pitches and 13 strikeouts, I’d say he’s already a ‘Don’t Overthink It.’ It’s such a small slate, you should play a just-in-case Toronto stack against him in MME, but outside of that, I would be playing Strider everywhere right out of the gate.

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Wednesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

This pitching slate looks similar to last night, where we have plenty of options but none being outstanding. Almost no one came through last night, and it certainly feels like we could run into the same thing here. At first glance, I see this as a spread-it-out slate, but let’s see if anything changes as we dig in. I’m going to sort into these three buckets:

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Aaron Nola vs. Giants – 24% K, 6.2% BB, 3.71 ERA, 3.67 SIERA
• Bobby Miller vs. Rockies – 20.2% K, 11.6% BB, 8.52 ERA, 4.84 SIERA
• Bryce Miller at Reds – 23.8% K, 6.9% BB, 3.07 ERA, 3.89 SIERA
• Robbie Ray at Phillies – 29.3% K, 13.1% BB, 4.11 ERA, 4.05 SIERA
• Brandon Pfaadt at Marlins – 23.8% K, 5.4% BB, 4.60 ERA, 3.67 SIERA

This is sort of a top tier, but we have flaws with everyone. Robbie Ray has the always flaw of walks and homers. Aaron Nola has the continued downward trend with strikeouts. Bryce Miller has had shaky control and has as big of a ballpark downgrade as you can get. Bobby Miller hasn’t been good since 2023. Brandon Pfaadt is a lower-strikeout pitcher with home-run issues who is all the way down at a 17.4% K% to start this season.

In all that mess, what stands out to me are the salaries and/or matchups for Brandon Pfaadt and Bobby Miller. If everyone has question marks, then the other factors, beyond the pitchers’ skills, come into play more. We’ll get into those two in a minute, but let’s start up top.

Let me start by saying I’m just not an Aaron Nola fan at this point, especially if he is going to be somewhat popular, which I expect he will. He still may well be the ‘safest’ option on this slate, and as much as I’m down on him, he has shown moderate upside in 2 of his 3 starts this season. I think he is a completely respectable pitcher at this point in his career, and I’d call him above average. I just think everyone, including projections, still just has too much weight on the guy he used to be. If for some reason it looks like Nola is not going to be played heavily, then sure, I guess I’d kind of sort of call him the SP1 on a slate that really doesn’t have an SP1.

Robbie Ray looked more like Robbie Ray last time out, with 7 strikeouts and 4 walks in 4 innings. Taking 98 pitches to get through 4 innings is as Ray as a Ray can be. If he’s back to being himself, that means we can put all the Robbie Ray rules into effect. That means I will play him if he’s not popular, and I will always stack against him. My initial hunch is that he is not going to get much ownership at all, therefore, I’m playing him ahead of Nola. There is very real downside here, so I’m not going overboard, but he still has the stuff to dominate.

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