DraftKings MLB DFS Cheat Sheet For August 4: Projections, Ownership, And Stacks

Tuesday, August 4 is an 11-game DraftKings MLB main slate with a 7:05 PM ET first pitch, and today's free MLB DFS cheat sheet from Stokastic is a pitcher board from top to bottom. All five rows of the projections panel are starting pitchers, four of the five ownership rows are arms, and the two biggest top-150 exposure numbers on the entire sheet belong to MacKenzie Gore and Patrick Sandoval. On the one site that makes you roster two pitchers, that is not a coincidence; it is the slate's identity. The hitting core is simpler: the Tampa Bay Rays are at Coors Field, and their 5-stack laps the panel. I will walk through what the board says tonight, make the two-pitcher call it is loudly hinting at, and finish by turning Gore's row into an actual DraftKings entry for the August 4 slate.

Tarik Skubal — one of the featured players on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

Pay for both arms. MacKenzie Gore, starting at home for the Texas Rangers tonight, leads three of the six panels, first in ownership at 34.4%, first in top-150 exposure at 76.0% and first in leverage at 41.6%, and the Sims pair him with slate-best projection Tarik Skubal, who takes the ball for the Dodgers at Wrigley. The hitting answer is the Rays' 5-stack at Coors, which the Sims build in 18.7% of their best lineups, with Shohei Ohtani as the top one-off leverage bat at 13.5% ownership. The full board, the pitcher pairing, and a slot-by-slot build for tonight are below.

Today's Board: Five Pitchers On Top And One Stack At Altitude

Here is the top of each panel on today's sheet, straight from the free page:

A quick decoder, kept short because tonight is about the picks: Proj FP is median projected DraftKings fantasy points, Own% is projected field ownership, Value is projected points per $1K of salary, top-150 exposure is how often a player appears in the 150 highest sim-ROI lineups, and Lev% is the gap between how often the Sims want a player and how often the field will roster him. That gap is where tournament edge lives, as the tournament strategy guide covers in depth.

Gore's leverage row is the one to sit with, because the math is right on the sheet: 76.0% top-150 exposure minus 34.4% projected ownership is his 41.6% leverage, the widest field-versus-Sims disagreement on the board. The field is going to make Gore the most popular player on the slate, and the Sims are saying that still is not popular enough.

Two Pitcher Slots, And The Board Picked Both Of Them

DraftKings rosters two pitchers, so pitching carries roughly twice the build weight it does on one-pitcher sites, and tonight's projections panel is effectively a ranked pitcher menu. The matchups behind the five names: Skubal starts for the Dodgers at the Cubs, Gore is at home for Texas against the Giants, Logan Henderson pitches for Milwaukee at home against Pittsburgh, Ryan Weathers takes the ball for the Yankees against St. Louis, and Joe Ryan starts for Minnesota in Kansas City. That is why the DraftKings and FanDuel differences matter tonight instead of being trivia: on a one-pitcher site this board forces a choice, and on DraftKings it forces a pairing.

The Statcast layer says the Sims are not chasing ghosts. Skubal has allowed just 7.5% barrels and a .349 expected slugging this season, the best expected slugging against among tonight's chalk arms, which is why his 20.6 Proj FP tops the panel. Gore sits at 9.2% barrels allowed and a .381 expected slugging, a notch behind Skubal on process, but he draws the Giants while Skubal gets the Cubs, and the Sims clearly like the Texas side of that trade: Gore's 76.0% exposure more than doubles Skubal's 34.0%.

The interesting third wheel is Patrick Sandoval, at home for Boston against the White Sox. He is only 16.7% projected ownership, but the Sims put him in 48.0% of their top-150 lineups, and his leverage row also reconciles exactly: 48.0 minus 16.7 is his 31.3%. His 5.1% barrels allowed is the lowest of the three, even if the .406 expected slugging behind it is more ordinary. In cash games I want the Skubal-Gore pairing and the projection floor it brings. In tournaments, swapping either arm for Sandoval is the cheapest real leverage on the board, and the value column exists to pay for whichever pair you choose. Hold that thought; it becomes the last decision of tonight's build.

The Rays 5-Stack At Coors Is The Hitting Core

DraftKings caps you at five hitters from one team, which is why this sheet surfaces 5-stacks, and five correlated bats is the classic DraftKings tournament shape: when a team hangs a crooked number, the stack collects the singles, runs and RBI together, and the correlation math does the ceiling-raising for you. Tonight the panel is not close. The Sims build a Tampa Bay 5-stack in 18.7% of their best lineups, with Minnesota next at 6.0%, then Toronto and the Yankees at 5.3% and San Francisco at 4.0%. A 12.7-point gap between first and second is the whole hitting slate in one cell, and the reason is the address: the Rays are playing the Rockies at Coors Field.

Two Rays are named on today's board, and they are different kinds of plays. Jonathan Aranda, fifth in leverage at 20.7%, is the real power piece, with a 10.2% barrel rate and .456 expected slugging that plays anywhere and gets louder a mile up. Cedric Mullins, fourth in both top-150 exposure at 35.3% and leverage at 23.2%, is the honest opposite: his 3.9% barrel rate says the Sims are not buying his power at all. His exposure is about the environment, the run-scoring context, and DraftKings scoring that pays stolen bases 5 and singles 3; at Coors, a contact-and-speed profile keeps scoring even when the ball stays in the yard. One caution an expert would want stated plainly: Colorado starter Gabriel Hughes has allowed only 2.9% barrels and a .270 expected slugging, strong contact numbers by any standard. The stack case tonight is the park and the correlation, not a broken arm, which is exactly why the Sims express it as an 18.7% stack rate rather than a 40% one.

Ohtani And The Value Column Fill The Other Slots

A 5-stack plus two pitchers leaves three hitter slots, and the board has opinions about all of them. The loudest is Shohei Ohtani, third in top-150 exposure at 38.7% against just 13.5% projected ownership. His Statcast page is the best on the sheet, a 16.4% barrel rate, .578 expected slugging and 53% hard-hit rate, and he draws Cubs starter Javier Assad, who has allowed 7.5% barrels and a .434 expected slugging. The DraftKings wrinkle: Ohtani and Skubal are teammates now, and rostering a hitter with his own starting pitcher is perfectly legal, since the five-hitter team cap does not count pitchers. A Skubal-plus-Ohtani pairing doubles your exposure to a good Dodgers night, and the Sims clearly do not mind it.

The value panel is where the sheet quietly funds the two arms, and four of its five rows map onto a stack row. Alan Roden, tonight's top value at 3.28 projected points per $1K, is a Twins outfielder, and Minnesota is the panel's second stack at 6.0%, facing Randy Dobnak in Kansas City. Austin Wells (2.98) is the catcher route into the Yankees' 5.3% stack row. Jesus Sanchez (2.95) is Toronto's piece of its 5.3% row. The bottom two rows of the value panel carry a warning label, though: Christian Koss (2.65) is a Giants infielder, and San Francisco's 4.0% stack bats against MacKenzie Gore, while Edgar Quero (2.60) and the White Sox face Sandoval, and Chicago is the one value team with no stack row behind it at all. If you are on the board's pitcher chalk, those bats belong in someone else's lineup; rostering hitters against your own arms is how a good pitcher night cancels itself out. The full projections behind every one of these rows, including the names the top fives cut off, live in the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub.

Worked Example: Gore's Row Into A DraftKings Build

Now the promised walk-through, one row to a real entry. Gore's full line tonight: second in projections at 18.4, first in ownership at 34.4%, first in top-150 exposure at 76.0%, first in leverage at 41.6%. When the most-owned player on the slate is still its biggest leverage play, the field is not chalky enough, and that is a play-him signal, not a fade signal. Here is how the rest of the board assembles around him, decision by decision:

1. Set the pitcher pairing. Gore plus Skubal in cash, for the two best projections and the two best contact-management profiles on the slate. In tournaments, Sandoval at 16.7% ownership over Skubal at 27.8% is the board-approved pivot; his 31.3% leverage is second only to Gore himself.
2. Build the Tampa Bay 5-stack. Aranda and Mullins are the two board-named Rays; the other three seats come from the full projections rather than the top-five rows the free page shows, which is exactly the cutoff where the sheet hands off to the paid tables.
3. Spend one slot on Ohtani. At 13.5% ownership with a 24.5% leverage number, he is the best single bat on the board, and he pairs legally with his own starter Skubal.
4. Fill from the value column, correlation-aware. Wells behind the plate and Roden in the outfield are the clean fits at 2.98 and 3.28, and Roden doubles as a one-bat bridge into Minnesota's 6.0% stack row. Skip Koss and Quero in any lineup that starts Gore or Sandoval.
5. Know what the sheet did not answer. No second baseman, third baseman or shortstop outside Koss appears on today's panels, so the middle infield and third base are where your remaining salary flexes and where the full projections take over. If lineup news breaks after rosters lock, the late swap guide covers how to react without breaking the stack.

Every number in that build comes out of the same engine. The Stokastic Sims play the slate tens of thousands of times with correlation intact, so a Rays 5-stack scores in the Sims the way it would at Coors, with runners crossing in front of the homer. Stokastic's Ownership Projections run through the same engine as a distribution rather than a single guess, which is how the leverage panel can price the field-versus-Sims gap at all, and the lineup pool is then ranked by simulated ROI, with the top 150 becoming the exposure panel you read above. The MLB DFS Sims guide covers the pipeline in full. The cheat sheet itself is free every day, and no code discounts it, because there is nothing to discount. Code CHEAT takes 15% off your first week or month of the paid Stokastic MLB DFS packages behind it, where the complete projections, Ownership Projections, Boom/Bust tables and the Sims themselves live.

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FAQ: August 4 Slate Questions

Is MacKenzie Gore worth playing at 34.4% ownership? Yes. His 76.0% top-150 exposure means the Sims roster him in three of every four of their best lineups, more than double his projected ownership. He can still have a bad night; the number says the ownership price is right, not that the outcome is promised.

Should I stack the Rays at Coors or fade the chalk stack? Build it in cash and small-field contests; an 18.7% stack rate with a 12.7-point lead on the field is the Sims' clearest hitting signal tonight. In large-field tournaments, differentiate inside the game rather than off it: the board itself only names Aranda and Mullins, so which three Rays complete the stack is where your lineup separates from the other Tampa Bay builds.

Which value play is the safest tonight? Roden at 3.28 is the number, but Wells at 2.98 is the shape I trust most, a catcher, the hardest slot to fill, inside the Yankees' own 5.3% stack row against St. Louis. Treat Koss and Quero as conditional values: fine in builds that skip Gore and Sandoval, self-defeating in builds that do not.

Can I roster Skubal and Ohtani in the same lineup? Yes. The five-hitter-per-team cap on DraftKings does not count pitchers, so Skubal plus Ohtani is legal and correlated with the same Dodgers win. It is a tournament-flavored pairing: one bad Skubal inning hits both slots, which is part of why the field will not do it at 13.5% Ohtani ownership.

One Board, One Story

Tonight's sheet is a pitcher slate on the site that rosters two of them, with one hitting exception at altitude, and the honest way to act on that is a split, not a single lineup. Most of my entries start Gore and Skubal over the Tampa Bay core, exactly the five-decision build above. A real minority swap Skubal for Sandoval at 16.7% ownership and keep everything else intact. And one build leans on the panel's second answer, Minnesota's 6.0% stack paired with its own starter Joe Ryan in Kansas City, for the night the Coors game disappoints everyone in it. The gap between the field and the Sims is the only thing a sheet can actually promise, and the read stays right even if the box score disagrees. You must be 21+ to play. Tomorrow's board will say something different, and it should.

When you want the full lineup pool behind tonight's panels instead of the top-five skim, the paid layer is where the Sims live, and the discount applies to your first week or month.

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