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

Friday, August 7 brings a full 15-game MLB schedule, and today's free MLB DFS cheat sheet from Stokastic reads like two different slates. The ownership panel says the field will be on Shohei Ohtani, Nathan Eovaldi, Pete Crow-Armstrong, and a pair of Red Sox names. The leverage panel, the column where tournament edge actually lives, spends four of its five rows on Jose Ramirez, Corey Seager, Jo Adell, and Kyle Stowers. Exactly one player appears on both panels, and that split is tonight's story. The field's favorites and the Sims' favorites barely overlap, which means the board is handing out separation without asking you to fade anything. I am going to follow that split through the pitcher call, a Cleveland stack carrying two of the top three leverage plays, and a build you can act on before the night's first pitch at 6:40 PM ET. The reason the leverage column keeps landing on Cleveland is standing on the mound in Chicago, and I will get there.

Shohei Ohtani — one of the featured players on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

Build around Jose Ramirez and the 12.0% Cleveland 4-stack. Ramirez shares the top of the exposure panel at 39.3% while his projected ownership does not crack the board's top five, which is how he leads the leverage panel at 27.4%, and new Guardian Jo Adell sits third at 16.5% in the same lineup. Nathan Eovaldi is the pitcher: he tops the projections at 34.31 and is the only arm the exposure panel lists at all. The full six-panel board, the one-pitcher decision, and the Cleveland build are below.

Today's Board: Two Slates In One Sheet

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 column is where tournaments are won, as the tournament strategy guide covers in depth.

The row worth sitting with is Ramirez at the top of two panels at once. He and Ohtani share the exposure lead at 39.3%, but Ohtani arrives with 25.4% projected ownership while Ramirez does not even make the ownership panel's top five, which cuts off at Ceddanne Rafaela's 15.2%. Identical exposure, wildly different price in ownership terms. Ramirez is hitting .234, and the field prices him off that number; the Sims instead see 27 steals and a hitter with more walks than strikeouts this season, 47 against 46, on a site where a walk pays 3 points, the same as a single. FanDuel's flat scoring is built for exactly that profile.

The Pitcher Slot Makes Itself Tonight

FanDuel rosters one pitcher, not two, so the projections panel, all five rows of it starting arms, is really a single decision. Tonight the board answers its own question. Eovaldi leads at 34.31 projected FanDuel points, sits second in ownership at 21.9%, and is the only pitcher anywhere on the top-150 exposure panel, third at 30.0%. When the engine plays a chalk arm even more often than the field does, that is an endorsement, not a fade signal. His season line is honest about the risk, a 4.31 ERA with 24 home runs allowed in 127⅓ innings, but the strikeouts are real at 135 with a 9.54 K/9, and the board quietly backs his side of the game twice: Texas is the third stack at 8.7% against Baltimore's Shane Baz, who has walked 45 hitters on his way to a 4-10 record. On a one-pitcher site, your starter and his own lineup rise together, so Eovaldi plus Rangers bats is correlation, not conflict.

The wrinkle is the middle of the panel. Logan Gilbert, third at 33.02, and Drew Rasmussen, fourth at 30.49, face each other in Seattle tonight, so the sheet is listing two answers to one question. Gilbert brings a 0.99 WHIP, Rasmussen a 2.91 ERA and a 0.93 WHIP, and there is no wrong side on talent. The exposure panel settles the duel by skipping it entirely: neither name appears, only Eovaldi does. Payton Tolle at 33.37 is the other complication. The field will be on the Boston lefty at 16.5% ownership, fourth on that panel, but his top-150 exposure sits somewhere below the 26.0% cutoff, so the engine likes him less than his projection suggests. If you want to be different at pitcher, Tolle at least pairs naturally with the Red Sox stack row, and Milwaukee rookie Shane Drohan, fifth at 29.96 with a 3.48 ERA, is the deep pivot the field will ignore. Full slate-long pitcher projections, ownership, and stack data live in the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub.

Tonight's pitcher call: Eovaldi, in cash and most tournaments. Projection leader, and the only arm the exposure panel lists at 30.0%, above his own 21.9% ownership. The Gilbert-Rasmussen duel splits one game's outcomes; let the field fight over it.

The Cleveland Stack Carries Both Leverage Stories

Now the payoff on Chicago. Cleveland's 12.0% stack row exists because the White Sox are starting Noah Schultz, a rookie left-hander carrying a 5.82 ERA and a 1.38 WHIP with 31 walks in 65 innings. A wild lefty handing out baserunners is what a stack converts into runs, and the board's leverage panel names the two Guardians it wants doing the converting. Ramirez, a switch hitter who turns around to bat right-handed against the lefty, leads at 27.4%. Jo Adell, third at 16.5%, is the name nobody's ownership projection has caught up with: he is three games into his Cleveland tenure after arriving from the Angels, he bats right-handed, and his 16 home runs this season give the stack its power piece. Two of the top three leverage plays, one dugout, one struggling opposing arm. The sheet names those two; the other two stack spots come from the full Cleveland projections, and correlated bats raise each other's ceilings, as the correlation strategy guide explains.

The stack panel's actual leader deserves its own honest paragraph. Chicago's Cubs top the column at 12.7% against Kansas City, and the matchup is stranger than a bad pitcher: Daniel Lynch IV has a 1.96 ERA and a 0.93 WHIP this season without starting a single game, all 46 of his innings coming in relief. The Sims are not stacking against Lynch so much as against the bulk innings behind a converted reliever, plus a contact profile, 6.85 K/9, that lets balls find grass. Pete Crow-Armstrong, third in ownership at 17.4% and the only Cub named on the sheet, is having the kind of season that makes chalk rational, a .289 average with 26 home runs and 29 steals. The one caution is that he bats left-handed against the lefty Lynch, so the Cubs stack's first look is its toughest. I have Chicago builds tonight, but Cleveland gets the majority share because its leverage is printed on the board rather than implied. Milwaukee at 6.7% against Zebby Matthews, who has allowed 16 home runs in 81 innings, is the quiet stack-row alternative behind its own rookie lefty Drohan.

The Value Column Points At One Wild Arm

Kyle Stowers leads the value panel at 4.07 points per $1K, and he is not a one-panel accident: fourth in top-150 exposure at 28.0% and fourth in leverage at 16.4%, three panels in all. The reason pitches for the Angels tonight: George Klassen has walked 10 hitters and struck out 6 across 4⅔ big-league innings this season, with a 3.64 WHIP. Stowers bats left-handed against the righty and owns a .453 slugging percentage with 16 home runs, so the platoon lean and the free baserunners point the same direction. Xavier Edwards, third in value at 3.93 with a .288 average and a .369 on-base percentage, is the same game's table-setter. Miami does not crack the stack panel's top five, so the board treats the Marlins as pieces rather than a full four-man commitment; a Stowers-Edwards mini-stack is how I play it.

The rest of the value column is Boston. Jarren Duran at 4.02 is a price play, not a talent call, with a .204 average doing the discounting and 15 home runs supplying the ceiling. Masataka Yoshida at 3.87 is the contact route, 25 walks against 28 strikeouts, batting left-handed like Duran against Athletics righty Jack Perkins. Perkins misses bats, 89 strikeouts in 73⅔ innings, but his 6.72 ERA is the highest of the five arms the stack panel targets, and he has allowed 14 home runs. That is why Boston holds a stack row at 6.7% and why Rafaela, fifth in ownership at 15.2% but absent from every other panel, is the one Red Sox name I would let the field have. If you roster Tolle, remember the Boston bats are his teammates, another rise-together pairing on this site, and the FanDuel and DraftKings differences explain why these 4-man stacks leave four bat slots free for exactly these one-offs.

The Chalk The Sims Actually Endorse

Ohtani is the bridge, the only player on both the field's list and the engine's list, and tonight the two agree for good reason. He leads ownership at 25.4%, sits fourth in value at 3.88, shares the top of the exposure panel at 39.3%, and still holds fifth in leverage at 13.6%, four of the six panels in all. Arizona is starting Merrill Kelly, whose season reads like a stack invitation: a 5.04 ERA, a 1.49 WHIP, 23 home runs allowed in 114⅓ innings, and a 5.98 K/9 that puts balls in play. Ohtani is hitting .297 with 26 home runs and a .953 OPS. On FanDuel there is an extra reason not to get cute: when a walk pays the same 3 points as a single, the scoring gap between the chalk bat and the contrarian bat compresses, so fading a player this endorsed buys you less than it would on DraftKings. My rule on this site is to take the chalk you agree with and take your leverage where the board hands it to you. Tonight it hands you Cleveland, not an Ohtani fade.

Worked Example: Ramirez's Row Into A FanDuel Build

One row into an entry for tonight. Ramirez's full line: first in top-150 exposure at 39.3%, first in leverage at 27.4%, ownership below the panel's 15.2% cutoff. Decision by decision:

1. Lock Ramirez and Adell together. They are two of the top three leverage rows and they share a dugout against Schultz, so they arrive as a pair, half of the four-man cap FanDuel allows from one team.
2. Fill the other two Cleveland slots from the full projections. The free sheet names two Guardians; the complete stack order lives in the DataHub tables linked above, and those two picks decide whether the stack is top-heavy or balanced.
3. Set the pitcher before the one-offs. Eovaldi conflicts with nothing in a Cleveland build, and the MLB DFS Sims guide shows how the engine grades pitcher outcomes across the whole distribution rather than off one median number.
4. Spend the four remaining bat slots on the board's other columns. Stowers and Edwards bring the Klassen matchup as a mini-stack, Ohtani is the endorsed chalk, and Seager, second in leverage at 18.4% and batting left-handed against Baz, doubles as the start of a Texas pivot in Eovaldi builds.
5. Recheck at lock. Klassen's short outings and a converted reliever in Kansas City mean lineup news moves late ownership; 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 an Adell homer and a Ramirez run scored land together the way they would in Chicago. 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 Shohei Ohtani worth 25.4% ownership? Yes, and he is the rare chalk with proof: the only player on both the ownership panel and the leverage panel, on four of six panels overall, against a Merrill Kelly line that includes 23 home runs allowed. FanDuel's flat scoring makes fading him even less rewarding than usual. I have him in most builds and still clear room for the Cleveland core.

Should I stack Cleveland or Chicago? Cleveland is my majority stack even from the second row at 12.0%, because it carries the leverage panel's first and third names against Schultz's 31 walks in 65 innings. Chicago at 12.7% is a real piece of the pool, but its named bat is a lefty opening against a lefty, and its case rests on the innings behind Lynch rather than Lynch's own 1.96 ERA. Split entries, weight Cleveland.

Which pitcher do I play from a five-arm projections panel? Eovaldi. He is the projection leader at 34.31 and the exposure panel's lone pitcher at 30.0%, above his own ownership. Gilbert and Rasmussen cancel each other in Seattle, one roster slot cannot hold both sides of a duel, and Tolle's exposure falls short of the board's top five. Drohan at 29.96 is the tournament-only pivot.

Is Jarren Duran's 4.02 value real with a .204 average? It is real salary math and a thin batting line, which is exactly what the value panel measures: points per $1K, not talent. He belongs inside Boston builds against Perkins, who has allowed 14 home runs in 73⅔ innings, and sized as a tournament piece rather than a cash-game anchor.

The Board Split, And Cleveland Won It

Some sheets crown one player; this one drew a line down the middle of the slate. The field's five and the Sims' five share a single name, and everything I am doing tonight follows from which side of that line a player sits on. Most of my entries carry the Ramirez-Adell core with Eovaldi, since chalk at pitcher and leverage at bat is the cleanest way to spend a one-pitcher roster. A second tranche doubles the Texas side, Eovaldi with Seager and the 8.7% stack row against Baz's 45 walks. A smaller share stacks the Cubs against a bullpen-shaped start, and the constant across all of them is the Stowers-Edwards pairing against Klassen's 10 walks in 4⅔ innings. The only name I am deliberately light on is Rafaela, the one piece of chalk the Sims left alone. You must be 21+ to play. Tomorrow's board will draw its line somewhere else, and that is the point of reading it fresh every day.