Million Dollar Musings: MLB DFS Picks Today for Wednesday 6/18

by Dave Potts (CheeseIsGood) Last Updated 2025-06-18 18:23:19 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 a big 11-game slate tonight, but there are a ton of weather concerns that could knock it down to a smaller set of games. Because of how many games have orange and yellow in them, I’m going to just include everything in the analysis as if all these games play cleanly. But do not get comfortable with anything until we get the afternoon report on the MLB weather page.

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Wednesday Pitching: MLB DFS Picks on FanDuel & DraftKings

We have a very clear top tier of pitching today, and then a sizeable drop-off to a bunch of dart throws. My initial instinct is to go out of my way to spend up on pitching, but let’s dig in and see what we find.

TOP TIER PITCHING

• Chris Sale vs. Mets – 31.7% K, 7.4% BB, 2.79 ERA, 2.89 SIERA
• Framber Valdez at A’s – 26.7% K, 7.8% BB, 3.10 ERA, 3.08 SIERA
• Sonny Gray at White Sox – 26.1% K, 4.6% BB, 3.84 ERA, 3.16 SIERA
• Kris Bubic at Rangers – 25.9% K, 8.2% BB, 1.92 ERA, 3.54 SIERA

We are seeing vintage Chris Sale, and the matchup has not mattered at all. He has 8+ strikeouts in 7 of his last 8 starts and has regularly been getting 100+ pitches and 7 innings. Sure, it’s not the best matchup in the world, but it is no tougher than his last two starts, when he struck out 21 batters in 13 innings. He’s the clear SP1; it’s just a matter of whether or not we can afford him.

Framber Valdez is not quite Chris Sale with the consistency of the strikeout ceiling, but he has reached that level in back-to-back starts, both of which were easy matchups. The A’s are not quite as bad as the White Sox and Pirates overall, where Valdez had 21 strikeouts in 12 innings over the last 2 starts, but the matchup is just as good for strikeouts. Even assuming the strikeouts come back down to his normal level, he always has the ground balls to fall back on and they help a lot with this ballpark. He’s the clear SP2, but just like Sale, it comes down to salary.

Sale and Valdez are priced up appropriately, both over $10,000 on both sites, so let’s see what else we find and then decide how heavily to prioritize them.

On FD, Sonny Gray and Kris Bubic are not at any useful discount from Sale and Valdez, so they are just leftovers there for me. On DK, they are $1,000 less, which is helpful, but they are still not easy to fit.

Between Gray and Bubic, the skills are close enough that I’ll side ever so slightly with Gray due to his matchup with the White Sox. But really, there is not a huge gap in the matchups, at least in terms of strikeouts, and Bubic has been much more consistent with his innings, so it’s extremely close.

The way this slate shapes up, these top four are a huge step above everyone else on the slate, but within the top four, there’s also a clear top two, then a gap to Gray and Bubic. With both of the top two pairs, I just have the slightest preference for one over the other, but I will be mixing and matching this group of aces early and often.

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