Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Wednesday 4/23

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-04-23 16:26:11 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 another typical Wednesday with games all over the place. We’ll focus on the evening main slate, which is slightly different between the sites. FD is starting early at 6:45 PM ET to include a couple extra games, while DK has an 8-gamer beginning at 7:00 PM ET. The 2 additional games on FD have no bearing on the pitching side of things but make a major impact for the bats.

With a slate starting right at 7:00 on the dot, our favorite weatherman, Kevin Roth, loses one of his favorite MLB things to complain about, which is unusual start times. Sorry Kevin, you will now have to admit that MLB is the best. Speaking of Kevin Roth, you should always start your day by looking at the MLB weather page to get your bearings for the slate. We’ll need to keep an eye on the weather in Kansas City, but most likely, should be OK everywhere tonight.

If you’re playing the early slates, we will have Expert tags and analysis available in our MLB DFS optimizer, LineupHQ.

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.

Wednesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

This is not a great pitching slate, but we do have three pitchers with strikeout rates above 26%, as well as a couple of good real-life pitchers and some decent pitchers in good matchups. I’m using the $8,000 mark on DK as the cutoff for tiers, leaving us with these two groups:

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Freddy Peralta at Giants – 27.8% K, 9.2% BB, 3.43 ERA, 3.71 SIERA
• Logan Webb vs. Brewers – 21.9% K, 6% BB, 3.34 ERA, 3.44 SIERA
• Eduardo Rodriguez vs. Rays – 23.8% K, 7.8% BB, 4.75 ERA, 3.90 SIERA
• David Festa vs. White Sox – 27.6% K, 7.9% BB, 4.30 ERA, 3.54 SIERA
• Taj Bradley at Diamondbacks – 26.4% K, 8.5% BB, 4.27 ERA, 3.71 SIERA
• Andrew Heaney at Angels – 22.9% K, 5.9% BB, 3.98 ERA, 3.90 SIERA

The best real-life pitcher here over the long run is Logan Webb, and in the early going this season, he has added DFS upside to his ledger with 2 double-digit strikeout games in his first 5 starts. I don’t really see any reason to believe the jump to a 33% K rate, but it’s enough to call him the SP1 on this type of slate. Unless we were to see a ceiling game from Peralta or Bradley, even the old version of Webb would probably be plenty good tonight. The matchup also makes it less likely that we see another big strikeout game here, but we can always count on the high pitch count and efficiency, so he’s my starting point.

While Webb has surged in strikeouts, Freddy Peralta has been a little shakier in his last 3 starts. Overall, he is at his usual 29% K range through 5 starts, so I’m viewing him as the same pitcher as always. He generally takes more pitches to get through an inning than Webb, so he really needs the extra strikeouts to match him. The upside is there, but it comes with some power risk, so while it’s close, he’s behind Webb, which leaves him out of my primary pool.

The trickiest one here is David Festa. He’s only 2 starts into his 2025 season and just 15 starts into his career, so we are left with question marks about his true talent level. He had enough strikeout ability in the minors that I buy into something in the 25-28% strikeout range, and against the White Sox, that would put him in the discussion for SP1. But then we also have the workload concerns, failing to reach 80 pitches yet this season. My opinion here is that he doesn’t have a hard pitch count ceiling, but that the Twins are not going to leave him out there past the first sign of struggle once he gets up towards 75+ pitches. Even in a good matchup, that makes it unlikely that he goes more than 5 innings. But I also would guess that if he’s just rolling along with no issues, an 85-pitch, 6-inning start is certainly a possibility. DK bumped his salary up to $8,800, which makes this a tougher decision. I am tentatively calling him my salary-adjusted SP2, but I am not going to be using Festa in more than about a third of my lineups tonight. I think he picks up more ownership than he realistically deserves for the pitch count questions. On FD, even without the likelihood of a quality start, I like his discount a lot more. If I need to go below $9,000, he would be my choice there.

I love Taj Bradley in general, but I do not at all love playing pitchers against this Arizona lineup. They don’t strike out, they take a lot of walks, and they have power throughout the lineup. I prefer Festa in this price range.

It’s a better matchup for Eduardo Rodriguez on the other side of the Rays-Diamondbacks game, with obscenely low power numbers from this Rays lineup against left-handed pitching. Like with Logan Webb, we’ve seen 2 big strikeout games so far this season, and while I also don’t believe he’s going to strike out 12 batters very often, it’s nice to know the possibility exists. If we just take the 2024-2025 numbers at face value, this is the guy I want to use as my pivot off of Festa, assuming that Festa is the higher owned of the two. In an ideal world, I would start DK lineups with Webb and one of Festa or Rodriguez.

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