Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Wednesday 8/13

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-08-13 18:57:36 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’ve got another split slate Wednesday where the sites are making things challenging with different slates. I’m going to start with a quick look at the 5-game early slate, which starts at 2:10 PM ET. Then, our main evening slate is a 6-gamer on DK at the usual 7:05 PM start time, while FD starts a little earlier at 6:35 PM ET to include 2 additional games.

And don’t forget to check out our MLB lineup optimizer, LineupHQ, for more early slate analysis.

The MLB weather might also play a factor tonight, with both of the New York games starting the day at Orange/Yellow. For now, I’ll include those games in the plans, but we’ll need to keep an eye on those as the day moves on.

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 Early Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

We have a pitching slate with one very obvious ace who is also in his own pricing tier. Then we find four decent but struggling pitchers in the mid-tier before we get down to the cheap dart throws. At the time I’m writing this, we don’t know who the Tigers starter will be, but whether it’s Troy Melton or Keider Montero, they are not going to make my pool. Melton is going to be a good pitcher, but $8,700 on DK is silly for a guy coming off 37 and 46 pitches. It’s basically a bullpen game with either of them.

THE LONE ACE

• Brandon Woodruff vs. Pirates – 34.9% K, 4.7% BB, 2.29 ERA, 2.60 SIERA

Woodruff has been incredible since coming back from the IL, putting together 6 strong starts in a row. He has seen home run issues, but when you’re getting strikeouts with no walks, a few home runs don’t ruin anything. I still remain skeptical that he’s actually this good, but he’s clearly the best pitcher on this slate by a huge margin, and this is not the matchup where you’d expect regression to come for him. He is bound to be massive chalk, so you can fade him just for that reason, but let’s see if we can find two other pitchers worth playing to make a fade viable.

MID-TIER QUARTET

• Merrill Kelly vs. Diamondbacks – 23.4% K, 7.7% BB, 3.38 ERA, 3.88 SIERA
• Seth Lugo vs. Nationals – 20.7% K, 8.3% BB, 3.46 ERA, 4.34 SIERA
• Zac Gallen at Rangers – 21.7% K, 8.4% BB, 5.31 ERA, 4.17 SIERA
• Mitch Keller at Brewers – 18.5% K, 6.4% BB, 3.86 ERA, 4.31 SIERA

All four of these pitchers are kind of okay, but they are clearly nowhere even remotely near Woodruff’s talent level.

I am a little concerned about the control for Merrill Kelly continuing to come and go, because he is the kind of pitcher that needs to keep the walks down to be successful. He now has 4+ walks in 3 of his last 5 starts and that just leaves him so far behind Woodruff that I can’t make a strong case to use Kelly as the SP1, even with the $1,700 discount on DK and a $2,100 discount on FD.

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