FanDuel MLB DFS Cheat Sheet For August 5: Projections, Ownership, And Stacks

Wednesday, August 5 is an 11-game evening FanDuel MLB main slate, and today's free MLB DFS cheat sheet from Stokastic has a favorite player. Fernando Tatis Jr. appears on four of the six panels: fourth in ownership, third in value, first in top-150 exposure at 62.7%, and first in leverage at 44.6%, the biggest gap between the Sims and the field anywhere on the sheet. His San Diego Padres lead the stack panel at 17.3%, nearly double the next team. Meanwhile the actual ownership leader, Kyle Schwarber at 25.3%, appears on no other panel at all. That split is tonight's story: the field's favorite bat versus the board's favorite bat. I am going to follow it through the pitcher call, the Padres stack, and a build you can act on before the 6:35 PM ET first pitch.

Fernando Tatis Jr — one of the featured players on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

Get Fernando Tatis Jr. into everything. The Sims put him in 62.7% of their 150 best lineups against 17.4% projected ownership, and they build a San Diego 4-stack in 17.3% of top lineups against Arizona rookie Mitch Bratt, a lefty who has walked more hitters than he has struck out this year. Paul Skenes is the pitcher, even at 23.0% owned. The full board, the one-pitcher decision, and the Tatis build are below.

Today's Board: One Name On Four Panels

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 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% measures how much more often the Sims want a player than the field is projected to play him. That last panel is where tournament edge lives, as the tournament strategy guide covers in depth.

The row worth sitting with is Tatis at 62.7% top-150 exposure against 17.4% ownership. He is hitting .280 with 26 steals this season, and FanDuel's flat scoring, where a walk pays 3 points, the same as a single, is friendly to exactly that kind of on-base, run-scoring profile. The field sees a Padre with 8 home runs; the Sims see the bat most likely to be standing on base when the board's biggest stack cashes. Which brings up a promise I will pay off in the stack section: the reason San Diego laps the field tonight is standing on the mound for Arizona.

The Pitcher Slot Is Tonight's Real Decision

FanDuel rosters one pitcher, not two, and that single slot carries more of a build's variance than any hitter can, which is why the projections panel is effectively a pitcher panel: all five names on it are starting arms. It is also why tonight is trickier than it looks. Skenes leads at 33.84 projected FanDuel points, but the third name, Kyle Harrison at 31.74, is the Milwaukee starter Skenes faces in the same game. On a two-pitcher site you could debate rostering both; on FanDuel the sheet is listing two answers to one question. Skenes brings an 11.26 K/9 and a 1.11 WHIP into Milwaukee; Harrison counters with a 3.01 ERA and a 10.86 K/9 of his own. The Sims side with Skenes, and loudly: he is the only pitcher on the exposure panel, third at 36.0%, ahead of even his 23.0% ownership. When the engine plays a chalk arm more often than the field does, that is not a fade signal, so Skenes is my cash-game pitcher and most of my tournament pitcher too.

The complicated name is Reid Detmers, second in projections at 33.28 and fifth in ownership at 17.3%. The board undercuts him in its own bottom-right corner: Baltimore is the second stack at 8.7%, and the Orioles' opponent tonight is Detmers. The engine that projects him for 33.28 points also builds Oriole 4-stacks against him in almost 9% of its best lineups, because a distribution of outcomes is allowed to like both sides of a game. A single entry is not. If I roster Detmers, no Orioles; if I stack Baltimore, my pitcher comes from the other 10 games. The clean pivots are Bryan Woo, fourth at 31.13 at home against Detroit, and Sean Burke, fifth at 30.00 at Fenway. Woo doubles as a natural pair with the Seattle stack row at 5.3%. Full slate-long pitcher projections, ownership and stack data live in the MLB DFS projections and ownership tables in the DataHub.

Tonight's pitcher call: Skenes, in cash and most tournaments. The only arm on the exposure panel at 36.0%, above his own 23.0% ownership. Pair Detmers only with a no-Orioles build.

Building Around The 17.3% Padres Four-Stack

San Diego leads the stack panel at 17.3% because Arizona is starting Mitch Bratt, a rookie left-hander carrying a 5.23 ERA and a 1.84 WHIP across his first 20⅔ big-league innings, with 12 strikeouts against 15 walks. A starter who walks more hitters than he strikes out is handing out baserunners, and baserunners are what a stack converts into runs. The platoon lean points the same direction: Tatis, Manny Machado and Freddy Fermin all bat right-handed against the lefty. Machado is the power half of the pair: 23 home runs and a .216 ISO this season, second in top-150 exposure at 39.3% and second in leverage at 28.5%. His projected ownership does not even crack the board's top five, which is exactly how 39.3% exposure turns into the second-biggest leverage number on the sheet.

FanDuel caps you at four hitters from one team, which is why this panel reads Top 4-Stacks rather than the five-man version DraftKings players know, and why the FanDuel and DraftKings differences change tonight's build rather than being trivia. The sheet names three Padres across its panels: Tatis, Machado and Fermin. Fermin, fifth in value at 3.99, is the cheap catcher route into the stack despite a .186 average; that row is a price play, not a talent call. The fourth stack spot comes from the full San Diego projections, and a shorter primary stack means the four remaining hitter slots do more work on this site than anywhere else. Correlated bats raise each other's ceilings, as the correlation strategy guide explains, so I spend those freed-up slots in three grounded directions:

• The Chase Field Bracket: Corbin Carroll, fourth in top-150 exposure at 35.3% and third in leverage at 21.8%, is the other dugout of the Padres game. He has a .227 ISO with 16 home runs, and he draws the toughest arm any board bat faces tonight in Casey Mize, a 2.70 ERA and 0.99 WHIP, so he is a ceiling bet that the game itself goes off, not the matchup win the Padres side is. Sims stacking both dugouts of one park is the board telling you where the runs are.
• Bobby Witt Jr. As The One-Off: fifth in exposure at 34.0%, fourth in leverage at 20.6%, and the best matchup argument on the board: Minnesota starter Dean Kremer has allowed 12 home runs in 36 innings, a 3.00 HR/9 no other arm facing a board bat comes close to. Witt's .283 average with 30 steals is the same FanDuel-friendly profile as Tatis.
• The Nationals Pivot: Washington ties Baltimore at 8.7% as the third stack because Philadelphia is starting Andrew Painter, who has struggled to a 6.72 ERA and 1.61 WHIP with 15 home runs allowed in 71 innings. Abimelec Ortiz, second in value at 4.19, is the named route in, with one honest caveat: he has played three major-league games, so that value number is a minimum-salary artifact, not a track record.

The Chalk The Sims Left Alone

The other side of tonight's split is the ownership panel. Kyle Schwarber leads it at 25.3%, and his case is real: a 17.3% barrel rate, .491 expected slugging and 33 home runs, against a Washington starter in Jake Irvin who has given up 9 home runs in 56⅔ innings. But he is the only board name that appears nowhere else, not on value, not on exposure, not on leverage. The Sims are not fading him so much as declining to overweight him, and FanDuel's compressed scoring is the reason that matters less than you would think. When a walk pays the same 3 points as a single, the gap between the chalk bat and the contrarian bat narrows, so being different for its own sake pays less here than on DraftKings. My rule on this site: take the chalk you agree with, and take your leverage where the board actually hands it to you. Tonight it hands you Tatis and Machado, not a Schwarber fade. Elly De La Cruz at 18.8% owned is the same read in miniature: a fine bat against a struggling lefty in Jacob Lopez, but the board routes that game through Eugenio Suárez instead, fourth in value at 4.00, right-handed against the lefty with 14 home runs.

Worked Example: Tatis's Row Into A FanDuel Build

One row into an entry for tonight. Tatis's full line: fourth in ownership at 17.4%, third in value at 4.07, first in top-150 exposure at 62.7%, first in leverage at 44.6%. Decision by decision:

1. Lock Tatis, then honor the correlation. He is not a one-off tonight; his 62.7% exposure exists because of the Bratt matchup, so he arrives with Machado and Fermin attached. That is three of the four-man cap.
2. Fill the fourth Padres slot from the full projections. The free sheet names three; the complete San Diego stack order lives in the DataHub tables linked above, and that fourth bat decides whether the stack is top-heavy or balanced.
3. Set the pitcher before the one-offs. Skenes does not conflict with anything in the build, and his Pittsburgh start in Milwaukee is walled off from every stack row on the board. This is where the one-pitcher site is actually simpler: one decision, made early, and the MLB DFS Sims guide shows how the engine grades those pitcher outcomes across the whole distribution.
4. Spend the last four bat slots on the board's leverage column. Carroll brackets the Padres game, Witt attacks Kremer, and Lawrence Butler, first in value at 4.54 and fifth in leverage at 17.0%, is the cheap outfield piece against Cincinnati's Rhett Lowder and his 1.52 WHIP. Butler's .208 average says the salary is doing the lifting, so he is a tournament piece, sized accordingly.
5. Recheck at lock. Bratt has been wild, Painter has been hittable, and lineup cards move ownership late; the late swap guide covers how to react without breaking your 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 Padres rally and a Tatis run scored land together the way they would at Chase Field. 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, and the lineup pool is ranked by simulated ROI with the top 150 becoming the exposure panel you read above. 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.

Start with 15% off your first week or month with code CHEAT.

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FAQ: Tonight's Slate Questions

Is Kyle Schwarber worth 25.3% ownership? In cash games, yes, the profile and the Irvin matchup are exactly what the field thinks they are. In tournaments he is the one piece of chalk the Sims declined to overweight, appearing on zero other panels, and FanDuel's flat scoring means skipping him costs less ceiling than it would on DraftKings. I have him in some builds and never all of them.

Should I stack San Diego or pivot? San Diego at 17.3% is the answer the board triple-confirms, stack panel, exposure panel, leverage panel. The pivots are Washington at 8.7% against Painter's 6.72 ERA, and Baltimore at 8.7% with the warning above: an Orioles stack rules out Detmers at pitcher, so it belongs in Skenes or Woo builds.

Which pitcher do I play from a five-arm projections panel? Skenes. He is the projection leader at 33.84 and the only pitcher the top-150 exposure panel endorses, at 36.0%. Harrison is on the wrong side of the same game, and Detmers carries the Baltimore-stack conflict. Woo at 31.13 is the tournament pivot that pairs with a Seattle stack.

Is Abimelec Ortiz's 4.19 value real? It is real salary math and thin evidence: three major-league games. Treat the value panel as a price column, not a talent ranking. He makes sense inside a Washington stack against Painter, not as a standalone core piece.

The Board Said One Thing Tonight

Some sheets spread their conviction across six panels; this one spent it all on one game. Tatis leads two panels outright, Machado sits second on two more, Fermin holds the value column's last row, and the stack panel puts San Diego at nearly double any other team, all because Arizona is starting a rookie lefty with more walks than strikeouts. So my entry split follows the conviction rather than diluting it: most builds carry the Padres four-stack with Skenes, a smaller tranche brackets Chase Field with Carroll, and the last few entries go Washington-against-Painter with Witt as the constant one-off, because his Kremer matchup does not depend on which stack I chose. The one thing no build of mine does tonight is pay 25.3% for the only bat the Sims left alone. You must be 21+ to play. Tomorrow's board will spend its conviction somewhere else, and that is the point of reading it fresh every day.