Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Wednesday 8/27

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-08-27 19:55:22 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 a 10-game slate that looks pretty wide open on the offensive side with a couple clear top pitchers in great matchups.

There is also a 3-game early slate starting at 1:05 PM ET. If you’re looking to play that early slate, we have some Expert Tags available in the MLB DFS optimizer to help get you started.

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

We have two top-tier pitchers with ideal matchups who stand out ahead of the pack, but I’m going to include all five pitchers priced at $8,500 and up on DK as the top tier:

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Framber Valdez vs. Rockies – 23.5% K, 8.3% BB, 3.32 ERA, 3.56 SIERA
• Sonny Gray vs. Pirates – 26.9% K, 4.2% BB, 4.33 ERA, 3.18 SIERA
• Nolan McLean vs. Phillies – 3rd career start
• Shohei Ohtani vs. Reds – 30.2% K, 4.3% BB, 4.61 ERA, 2.89 SIERA
• Quinn Priester vs. Diamondbacks – 19.4% K, 8.4% BB, 3.44 ERA, 4.03 SIERA

When looking at projections, name recognition, long-term stats, and matchups, Framber Valdez and Sonny Gray are going to jump off the page. You can certainly make the argument that Nolan McLean and Shohei Ohtani have more per-inning upside than Valdez and Gray, but they don’t have the track records, and more importantly, they aren’t at home against the Rockies or Pirates.

However, it’s still not super easy to feel great about Valdez as the only pitcher above $10,000 on both sites with how bad he’s looked over the past month. In his 4 August starts, he has just a 12:10 K:BB ratio with 19 runs allowed in 23 innings. Of course, none of those games were at home against the Rockies, and he had been his usual elite self prior to this stretch. I don’t see any red flags to suggest he’s injured or anything, but he’s simply not throwing as many strikes, and even the ground balls have not been there at his usual level. This feels kind of similar to where we were at with Max Fried before his last start when he turned things around. When guys have this long of a track record, unless there’s a red flag under the hood, I am just going to side with the long-term skills. The only thing I’ll say then is that the Rockies are not nearly as high of a strikeout team against lefties, so while Valdez is the SP1, let’s see what else we find before declaring him some kind of must-play at his salary.

The Pirates have had some success against the Cardinals’ pitching staff this week, but Sonny Gray is on an entirely different level than the other St. Louis starters. He has allowed some runs, mostly in tougher

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