MLB PrizePicks Predictions Today: Top Plays for Tuesday, June 25th
Traditional MLB DFS formats aren’t the only way to profit from daily fantasy baseball. MLB PrizePicks is a great fantasy pick’em site where we can take today’s projections versus theirs and combine two or more baseball predictions for sizeable payouts.
In this space, we’ll explore a few PrizePicks plays for the upcoming MLB slate. This article isn’t the be-all, end-all of great plays or a recommendation for a full ticket; it’s simply a starting place for you to explore thinking about the game within the game. Maybe you want to scatter these plays across entries. Maybe there are only two or three you think are worth playing. Daily fantasy pick’em gives us the flexibility to make only the plays in which we think there is value rather than being forced to create a full lineup while competing against the best DFS players in the industry.
PrizePicks is daily fantasy baseball made simple, and our MLB PrizePicks picks tool makes the process even simpler.
If you haven’t signed up for a PrizePicks account, make sure to use the PrizePicks promo code ROTOBONUS and get a $100 deposit match. Also, check out more apps like PrizePicks.
All stats cited are since the start of the 2024 season unless otherwise noted.
MLB PrizePicks Predictions for Tuesday, June 25th
- Freddie Freeman MORE Than 2.5 Total Bases (DEMON)
- Seth Lugo MORE Than 18.5 Outs (DEMON)
- Kevin Gausman MORE Than 5.5 Hits Allowed
- Kyle Gibson LESS Than 17.5 Outs and MORE Than 5.5 Hits Allowed
- Shohei Ohtani MORE Than 10.5 Fantasy Points
Freddie Freeman MORE Than 2.5 Total Bases (DEMON)
Freddie Freeman projects north of 2.0 total bases against any below-average pitcher. He gets to face the horrible Chris Flexen in a good park for home runs. This is a DEMON booster to which we want heavy exposure because we have Freeman projected for 2.8 total bases due to his .437 wOBA and .242 ISO against righties and Flexen’s 12% barrel rate allowed to lefties.
Seth Lugo MORE Than 18.5 Outs (DEMON)
Did you know that Seth Lugo is 3rd in MLB with 104.0 IP this season through 16 starts? That’s an average of about 19-20 outs per game. Facing the woeful Marlins, he shouldn’t get into much trouble to get an early hook because they are bad. Like, really bad. Miami is sitting at a .286 wOBA and .134 ISO against righties with just a 5% BB rate. Meanwhile, Lugo is just allowing a .282 wOBA and .125 ISO with a 5.7% BB rate while averaging 96.56 pitches per start. This is a ceiling spot for Lugo, who we have conservatively projected for 17.9 outs on the evening despite him getting 19, 18, 21, 18, 18, and 21 outs over each of his last 6 starts.
Kevin Gausman MORE Than 5.5 Hits Allowed
Kevin Gausman has seen his K rate go down from 30.9% in 2023 to 23% in 2024. His BB rate is down to 5.5%, but that just means that his contact rate is way up to 78.2%. That’s not an extreme contact rate, but it’s bad news when we couple that with how hard and well he’s being hit. Gausman has allowed an 11.2% barrel rate on a 50% hard-hit rate. We should like the Red Sox, who have a very hard-hitting projected top five that features Rafael Devers (62.5% hard-hit rate against righties), Tyler O’Neill (62.4%), Wilyer Abreu (61.5%), and Jarren Duran (52.6%), along with the 92nd-percentile sprint speed of David Hamilton. Add that Gausman has a long leash in the range of ~97 pitches — even when he’s bad — and we should see the Red Sox compile against him. We have Gausman projected for 7.3 hits allowed.
Kyle Gibson LESS Than 17.5 Outs and MORE Than 5.5 Hits Allowed
Don’t overthink this one. Kyle Gibson is an average pitcher at best, and the top six in the Braves lineup is still pretty stacked, despite the absences of Ronald Acuna and Michael Harris. Add that it’ll be 94 degrees at the first pitch in St. Louis, and 17.5 outs is just a really high number for just about any pitcher against Atlanta. We can see how our projection has Gibson for just 16.1 outs while surrendering 6.2 hits. The huge disparity between our projections and PrizePicks makes these two of the better plays on the board, according to our pick’em tool.
Shohei Ohtani MORE Than 10.5 Fantasy Points
The matchup for Shohei Ohtani is the same as that for Freeman. Ohtani has a PrizePicks DEMON projection of 3.5 total bases, which is risky because it’s so large, but a good play to attack, nonetheless. What’s better for us to attack is his soft fantasy points projection. We have Ohtani projected for 14.2 fantasy points — a whopping 35.2% more than PrizePicks — because he’s Shohei Ohtani and Flexen is Flexen. I might play this in 2/3rds of my contests, and I almost never have a hitter play in more than half of my contests. We have Ohtani projected for 3.4 total bases, so by all means, have some exposure to that DEMON play of MORE than 3.5 total bases.
All projections referenced are accurate at the time of writing but subject to change.
I’m not a huge fan of this slate for DFS at first glance because the plays are almost so obvious that everything I like might be chalk. But these are great situations for pick’em games where we just have to beat the house projections. There aren’t a lot of great DEMON projections on this slate, but the standard projections are very soft, according to our projections and pick’em tool, so we can play a high volume of contests within our bankroll. I normally play 2-3% of my pick ‘em bankroll. I’ll be on the higher end tonight, making ~5 plays per contest.
Image Credit: Getty Images