FanDuel MLB DFS Cheat Sheet For August 3: Projections, Ownership, And Stacks

Monday, August 3 is an eight-game FanDuel MLB main slate, and today's free MLB DFS cheat sheet from Stokastic is not being subtle about where it wants me. The Tampa Bay Rays are at Coors Field, and that one game leads the ownership panel, the value panel, the top-150 exposure panel, the leverage panel and the stack panel at the same time.

Junior Caminero — one of the featured players on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

Play the Rays. Junior Caminero is tonight's centerpiece at 24.5% owned with 36.5% leverage, the Sims build a Tampa Bay 4-stack in 38.7% of their best lineups against Michael Lorenzen at Coors, and the sneaky pitcher play is Rays starter Ian Seymour over chalk arm Cam Schlittler. The full board, the pitcher decision, and a finished nine-slot roster for tonight are below.

Today's Board: One Game Bends Five Of Six Panels

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

A quick decoder for anyone new to the sheet, kept short because tonight is about the picks: Proj FP is median projected FanDuel points, Own% is projected field ownership, Value is 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 engine's measure of how much more often the Sims want a player than the field is projected to play him — the bigger the number, the bigger the disagreement. That disagreement is where tournament edge lives, as the tournament strategy guide covers in depth.

Milwaukee, tonight's next-best stack with Brandon Sproat starting at home against Pittsburgh, checks in at 6.7%. The Rays sit at 38.7%. A 32-point gap between the first and second stack is the whole slate in one number: four Rays bats, Caminero, Jonathan Aranda, Cedric Mullins and Chandler Simpson, occupy the value and exposure panels almost by themselves, because hard contact against Lorenzen a mile above sea level is exactly what a simulation engine feasts on. Caminero brings a 13.5% barrel rate and .507 expected slugging into that matchup; Lorenzen has allowed 9.0% barrels and a .473 expected slugging this season.

The Pitcher Slot Is Tonight's Real Decision

FanDuel rosters one pitcher, not two, and that is the single biggest reason this page reads differently than a DraftKings breakdown of the same night. One arm carries most of a FanDuel build's variance, which is why the projections panel is effectively a pitcher panel: Schlittler leads at 35.97 projected FanDuel points at home against St. Louis, with Wrobleski (29.34), Sproat (29.20), Logan Webb (27.81) and Matt Boyd (27.08) behind him. Full slate-long pitcher projections, ownership and stack data live in the MLB DFS projections and ownership tables in the DataHub.

The field's plan is already visible in the ownership panel: Sproat at 18.1% owned and Schlittler at 16.4% owned are the pitcher chalk. In cash games I am happy to pay for Schlittler's projection lead and move on. In tournaments, the sheet is quietly making a different case. Ian Seymour, Tampa Bay's own starter, sits second in the leverage panel at 29.5% and fifth in top-150 exposure at 34.7%, despite pitching at Coors Field. He gives up his share of hard contact — 9.5% barrels allowed, a tick more than Lorenzen's 9.0% — but his .367 expected slugging allowed is far better than the .473 Lorenzen brings to the other dugout of the same game, and the field's very understandable Coors fear is precisely what creates the leverage. None of that makes Seymour safe. It is saying the Sims and the field disagree about him more than about any other arm tonight, and in a large-field tournament that disagreement is worth the risk.

One honest caveat on the second projection row: Wrobleski is the sheet's number for the Dodgers at Wrigley, but the league's official probables still listed that Dodgers start as TBD at post time. Confirm him before lock, and know how late swap works if the news breaks after rosters do.

Tonight's pitcher call: Schlittler in cash, Seymour in tournaments. Fifth in top-150 exposure, second in leverage — the board's biggest pitcher disagreement.

Building Around The 38.7% Rays Four-Stack

FanDuel caps you at four hitters from one team, which is why the stack panel is labeled Top 4-Stacks rather than the five-man version DraftKings players know, and why the FanDuel and DraftKings differences actually change tonight's build instead of being trivia. A four-man primary stack leaves four hitter slots open, so secondary pieces matter more here than on any other site.

The sheet has already named the primary four: Caminero, Aranda (second in top-150 exposure at 39.3%), Mullins (second in the value panel at 3.91, 15.4% owned) and Simpson (third in value at 3.90). Stacking them is not just a bet on runs; correlated bats raise each other's ceilings, as the correlation strategy guide explains, and when Caminero homers at Coors the Rays in front of him score with him.

For the freed-up slots, tonight's board offers three grounded directions:

• Corbin Carroll As The One-Off: third in top-150 exposure at 36.0% with 25.8% leverage, the board's best single bat outside Tampa Bay, at home for Arizona against San Diego.
• A Milwaukee Mini-Pair: the 6.7% second stack, at home against Pittsburgh, for anyone consciously avoiding an all-Rays build.
• The Philadelphia Game Bracket: the sheet lists both PHI (6.0%) and WSH (5.3%) stacks in the same game, which means the Sims see runs in Philadelphia from both dugouts. Trea Turner, fifth in ownership at 14.7%, and Jose Tena, fifth in value at 3.83 and tied there with Vladimir Guerrero Jr., are the named routes in.

FanDuel's scoring also softens how hard I fade the chalk. A walk pays 3 points, exactly what a single pays, and that walk parity raises the floor of high-ownership bats and compresses the gap between chalk and contrarian. On this site, on this slate, I am not talking myself out of 24.5% owned Caminero to be different. I take my leverage through the pitcher slot and stack shape instead.

Worked Example: Caminero's Row Into A Full Roster

Now the promised walk-through, one panel row to an actual entry. Caminero's full line tonight: first in ownership at 24.5%, first in value at 3.92, first in top-150 exposure at 61.3%, meaning he appears in 92 of the 150 best simulated lineups, and first in leverage at 36.5%. When the most-owned bat on the slate is still the biggest leverage play on the slate, the field is not chalky enough. That is a play-him signal, not a fade signal.

So here is the roster the board writes, slot by slot:

That is exactly four Rays hitters, the legal FanDuel maximum, with their own starter in the pitcher slot, plus the board's best one-off and the two named pieces of the Philadelphia game. One slot stays honestly open: second base does not appear anywhere on today's six panels, so that is where your remaining salary flexes and where I would shop the full projections rather than pretend the sheet answered it. One of the roster's nine slots, that open second base, came from outside the sheet's top fives; the other eight are straight off the free page.

Every one of those numbers is an output of the same engine. The Stokastic Sims play the slate tens of thousands of times with correlation built in, Ownership Projections feed the same runs, and the resulting lineup pool is ranked by simulated ROI, with the top 150 becoming the exposure and leverage panels above. The MLB DFS Sims guide covers that 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 and the Sims themselves live.

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FAQ: Tonight's Slate Questions

Is Junior Caminero worth playing at 24.5% ownership? Yes. His 61.3% top-150 exposure says the Sims want him at more than double his projected ownership, and FanDuel's walk parity means eating chalk costs less here than on DraftKings. He can still go 0-for-4; the number says the price in ownership is right, not that the outcome is certain.

Which pitcher is the value tonight? Seymour. Schlittler's 35.97 is the slate's best projection and the right cash-game anchor, but Seymour's 29.5% leverage on a .367 expected slugging allowed is the tournament play the field's Coors fear is funding.

Should I stack the Rays or fade the 38.7%? In cash and small-field contests, take the stack; it is the highest-scoring construction the Sims found by a mile. In large-field tournaments a 38.7% stack rate means Rays-stack lineups will be everywhere, so differentiate inside it, with Seymour over the chalk arms and the open slots spent on Carroll or the Philadelphia bracket, rather than fading Tampa Bay outright.

What about the Dodgers' starter? Wrobleski's 29.34 projection is the board's number, but the Dodgers had not officially confirmed their starter at post time. Treat that projection as provisional and re-check probables at lock before building around any Cubs or Dodgers bats.

The Board Said One Thing Tonight

Some slates the sheet whispers six different ideas. On August 3 it says one thing five different ways: Rays at Coors, with Caminero first in ownership, value, exposure and leverage at once, a 38.7% stack against Milwaukee's 6.7% in second, and the Sims backing Tampa Bay's own arm as the leverage pitcher. My entry tonight is the table above, and the read stays right even if the box score disagrees, because process is the only thing a sheet can promise. You must be 21+ to play. Tomorrow there will be a new board, and it will almost certainly say something else.

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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