DraftKings MLB DFS Cheat Sheet For August 7: Projections, Ownership, And Stacks

Friday, August 7 is a full 15-game MLB night with a 6:40 PM ET first pitch, and today's free MLB DFS cheat sheet from Stokastic opens with a photo finish: Nathan Eovaldi projects for 18.7 DraftKings points, Payton Tolle for 18.6, and the field is treating them as co-chalk at 30.9% and 29.3% projected ownership. A tenth of a point at the top, and then the rest of the board spends four panels breaking the tie. Tolle leads top-150 exposure at 52.7% and sits second in leverage; Eovaldi appears nowhere on the leverage panel, and the same sheet lists Baltimore, his opponent tonight, as its second-favorite stack at 11.3%. The board is not calling the pitcher race a coin flip. I will read it top to bottom, make the two-pitcher call DraftKings forces, and finish by turning Xavier Edwards' leverage row into an actual entry for the August 7 slate.

Nathan Eovaldi — one of the featured players on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

Start Payton Tolle, treat Nathan Eovaldi as the droppable half of the chalk, and build around Miami. Tolle's 52.7% top-150 exposure is the largest number on the entire sheet, while Eovaldi has allowed 24 home runs this season, more than any other confirmed starter on tonight's slate, and the board's Baltimore stack row is aimed straight at him. The bat side is clearer still: Xavier Edwards leads the leverage panel at 24.3%, his Marlins are the top stack at 16.0%, and they draw George Klassen, who has walked 10 and struck out 6 across two big-league starts. The full board, the pitcher routing, and a step-by-step Edwards build are below.

Today's Board: Two Chalk Arms, One Verdict

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

The short decoder, 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 tournaments are won, and the tournament strategy guide explains why it beats raw projection.

Tolle's presence on four of the six panels is the board's loudest statement. He is second in projection and second in ownership, but first in top-150 exposure and second in leverage, which means the Sims want him even more often than an already-chalky field does. Eovaldi shows up on three panels and the leverage board is pointedly not one of them. Hold that thought, because the stack panel is about to explain why.

Two Pitcher Slots And A Chalk Arm The Board Keeps Undermining

DraftKings rosters two pitchers, so pitching carries roughly double the build weight it does on one-pitcher sites, and tonight the position splits into a keep and a question. The keep is Tolle, who starts for Boston against the Athletics at Fenway with a 3.30 ERA and 110 strikeouts this season. The question is Eovaldi, who hosts Baltimore in Texas with strikeout stuff that is real, 135 punchouts at 9.54 per nine, attached to a 4.31 ERA and those 24 home runs allowed, a total no other confirmed starter on tonight's slate can match. The sheet respects his ceiling, second in top-150 exposure at 44.7%, but a projection lead of one tenth of a point does not survive contact with the leverage panel, where he is absent and Tolle sits at 22.7%. On DraftKings, unlike FanDuel, you do not have to choose between them, and the field mostly will not. That is exactly why the second slot is where lineups separate.

The board's own alternatives are stacked in one game: Logan Gilbert, third in projections at 17.9, hosts Tampa Bay for Seattle, and Drew Rasmussen, fourth at 16.3, starts the same game for the Rays. Gilbert brings a 0.99 WHIP and 139 strikeouts at 16.9% ownership, barely more than half of Eovaldi's number. Rasmussen might be the quieter arm in his own duel, a 2.91 ERA with just 20 walks all season, and he does not crack the ownership panel at all. Only one of them can collect DraftKings' 4-point win bonus, so treat the Seattle game as an either-or, not a pairing. Shane Drohan, fifth in projections at 15.9 in his debut season, gives Milwaukee a live arm against Minnesota, a 3.48 ERA with 0.72 homers per nine and no board hitter anywhere in his game. My routing: Tolle locked, then Gilbert or Rasmussen in tournaments, with Eovaldi reserved for cash games, where his raw projection matters and his ownership does not.

The Stack Panel Names A Favorite And Picks A Fight

Miami at 16.0% is the clearest top stack this sheet has printed in a while, nearly five points clear of second place, and the matchup explains it. The Marlins host the Angels and George Klassen, whose two big-league starts have produced an 11.57 ERA, a 3.64 WHIP, and more walks (10) than strikeouts (6) across 4⅔ innings. Two starts is a tiny sample, but a stack is a bet on one night, and the Sims see free baserunners everywhere. The panel names the Marlins to target him with: Xavier Edwards, first in leverage at 24.3% and fourth in top-150 exposure at 32.0%, hitting .288 with 18 steals, and Kyle Stowers, fifth in leverage at 19.9% with 16 home runs and a .221 ISO. A five-man Miami core built around those two, filled from the complete projections, is the correlated center of my tournament pool tonight.

Then comes the fight. Baltimore's 11.3% stack row is the same sheet that made Eovaldi its ownership chalk telling you it also likes the bats hitting against him, and both cannot cash the same night. The Sims are allowed to hold both opinions, that is what a distribution of outcomes means, but a single lineup is not: if you start Eovaldi, you have no business stacking the Orioles behind him, and if you believe in the BAL row, Gilbert and Rasmussen exist. Boston at 8.7% is the tidier double-dip, because the Red Sox face Jack Perkins and his 6.72 ERA with 1.71 home runs per nine, and DraftKings' rules let you pair a Boston stack with Tolle himself, since pitchers do not count against the five-hitter team cap. Chicago's 6.0% row is the board's most contrarian lean given that Cubs opponent Daniel Lynch IV has a 1.96 ERA, though notably without a single start this season, and Cleveland at 4.7% pairs Jose Ramirez, third in leverage at 22.1% with 27 stolen bases, against Noah Schultz and his 5.82 ERA.

A Value Panel Scattered Across Five Games

Tonight's five value rows come from five different games, which means the cheap bats will not all rise together and each one needs its own case. Austin Wells leads at 2.91, and his case is the matchup and the salary, not the season line: he is hitting .169, but he draws Tyler Mahle and his 5.13 ERA in the Bronx. Masataka Yoshida at 2.75 is the row I trust most, a .269 hitter with only 28 strikeouts in 267 plate appearances, sitting inside that Boston stack against Perkins. Blaze Jordan at 2.65 gets Ryan Feltner, whose 2.00 HR/9 is the highest of any confirmed starter tonight with double-digit starts, a clean one-off in the Cardinals lineup. The two rows that need honesty: Josh Lowe at 2.76 is hitting .201 for the Angels against Miami's Tyler Phillips, and Angel Genao's 2.75 covers exactly nine plate appearances, because he debuted for Cleveland on Wednesday. Both numbers are about salary. Play them as roster glue, Genao only inside a Guardians stack, and never as the reason a lineup exists. The names below the top-five cutoff, and the full projections behind every row here, live in the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub.

One printed absence worth noticing before the build: Shohei Ohtani is the only hitter on both the ownership and leverage panels, 16.3% owned against 21.7% leverage, with a third-best 38.7% top-150 exposure behind them, and the Dodgers have no stack row. So Ohtani, hitting .297 with 26 home runs against Merrill Kelly and his 23 homers allowed, is meant to be a one-off, not a stack.

Worked Example: Edwards' Row Into A DraftKings Build

Now the promised walk-through, one row into a real entry. Edwards' full line tonight: first in leverage at 24.3%, fourth in top-150 exposure at 32.0%, and no appearance on the ownership panel, which is the whole point. A .288 hitter with 18 stolen bases facing a starter who cannot stop walking people is exactly the profile DraftKings scoring overpays, 5 points per steal and 3 per single. Here is the build, decision by decision:

1. Anchor the Miami five-stack. Edwards and Stowers are the two board-named Marlins, covering the leverage panel's first and fifth rows; the other three spots come from the full projections. The 16.0% stack row says the Sims build this core more than any other tonight.
2. Lock Tolle, then route the second slot. Tolle's 52.7% top-150 exposure makes him the one piece of chalk the Sims fully endorse. In tournaments, my second arm is Gilbert or Rasmussen from the Seattle game, one side only. Eovaldi is the cash-game version of the slot.
3. Answer the Baltimore question with your pitcher. This build starts Tolle, not Eovaldi, so a two-man Orioles mini-stack behind the Miami core is live and pairs with the sheet's 11.3% row. If you kept Eovaldi instead, skip BAL entirely and mini-stack Boston with Yoshida.
4. Spend the savings on the one-off the board circled. Ohtani at 21.7% leverage is the eighth bat: five Marlins, two Orioles, Ohtani. That is a legal DraftKings shape, five plus two plus one, and every piece of it comes off a printed row.
5. Keep one bullet for the scattered value column. Jordan against Feltner's 2.00 HR/9 is the swap when salary pinches, and if lineup news breaks late, the late swap guide covers reacting without breaking correlation.

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 Marlins rally scores Edwards and Stowers together the way Klassen's walks would produce it in the real park. Stokastic's Ownership Projections run through the engine as a distribution rather than a single guess, which is how a leverage panel can exist at all. The resulting lineup pool is ranked by simulated ROI, the top 150 become the exposure panel you read above, and the Boom/Bust tables show each player's full range of outcomes instead of one median number. The MLB DFS Sims guide walks through the whole pipeline. 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 7 Slate Questions

Is Nathan Eovaldi worth 30.9% ownership? In cash games, yes: 135 strikeouts and the slate's top projection at 18.7 are real. In tournaments the board keeps arguing with him, no leverage row, 24 home runs allowed, and an 11.3% stack aimed at his start. Gilbert at 16.9% ownership is the board-approved way to be different at the position.

Can I stack Baltimore and still start Eovaldi? No. The Orioles' 11.3% row only pays on the night Eovaldi's start fails, and his win bonus dies in the same outcome. Pick a lane per lineup: Eovaldi with a Boston or Miami hitting core, or the BAL stack behind Tolle plus a Seattle-game arm.

Should I trust Angel Genao's value number? Trust what it is: a salary artifact. He debuted Wednesday and has nine big-league plate appearances, so his 2.75 is about price, not track record. He is fine roster glue inside a Cleveland stack against Schultz's 5.82 ERA and a bad reason to feel safe anywhere else.

Is Miami at 16.0% still worth it as the chalk stack? Yes, because the number the stack is betting on belongs to Klassen, not the Marlins: 10 walks against 6 strikeouts is a fire the Sims expect to spread. The edge is not fading Miami, it is choosing sharper company around it, Edwards and Stowers first, and letting the leverage panel, not the field, pick your eighth bat.

Where My Entries Land Tonight

Tonight's sheet opened with a tie and spent four panels breaking it, and my entry pool should look like the verdict. Most of my lineups start Tolle with the Miami core in front, the five-decision build above, Ohtani in the last slot. A real tranche swaps the second arm to Gilbert or Rasmussen and lets the Baltimore mini-stack ride the board's honest disagreement with its own chalk. And a smaller cash-minded set keeps Eovaldi, with Boston bats and Yoshida doing the funding and zero Orioles anywhere near it. The tenth of a point between Eovaldi and Tolle was never the story; the 52.7% exposure number and the stack row pointed at Texas were. 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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