FanDuel MLB DFS Cheat Sheet For August 9: Projections, Ownership, And Stacks

Sunday, August 9 is an afternoon slate, and today's free MLB DFS cheat sheet from Stokastic crowned two different kings. The field's king pitches in Milwaukee: Jacob Misiorowski leads the projections panel at 41.47, nearly seven points clear of second place, and leads the ownership panel at 38.1%, double the next name. The Sims' king plays shortstop in Kansas City: Bobby Witt Jr. tops the exposure panel at 52.7% and the leverage panel at 40.9%, and he is not on the ownership panel at all. One of them will be in nearly two of every five lineups the field enters today. The other is in more than half of the lineups the Sims build. This article follows the gap between them, and it runs straight through the 2:10 PM ET game at Kauffman Stadium, where the board's top stack lives on one side and Witt bats on the other. The pitcher Kansas City is starting there has a 1.16 ERA, and the reason the Sims are attacking it anyway is the number this whole slate turns on. I will get there.

Jacob Misiorowski, the field's favorite arm on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

Build around Bobby Witt Jr. He appears in 52.7% of the 150 highest sim-ROI lineups while his projected ownership, which you can back out from his 40.9% leverage, sits under 12%. Pair him with pieces of the 24.0% Cubs 4-stack from the same game, and take Jacob Misiorowski at pitcher unless you want the one clean pivot the board offers, Jesus Luzardo at half the ownership. The full six-panel board, the Kansas City game that dominates it, and a build that walks Witt's row into a roster are below.

Today's Board: One Panel Disagrees With The Rest

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

A short decoder, because today is about the names: Proj FP is median projected FanDuel 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 that optimal exposure and the field's ownership. Leverage is the column tournaments are won from, as the tournament strategy guide lays out.

The board even shows you its own math. Pete Crow-Armstrong sits at 46.0% exposure and 29.5% leverage, and the difference is exactly his 16.5% ownership. Run the same subtraction on Witt and the field has him around 12%. A hitter batting .286 with 13 home runs and 31 steals, on a site that pays 6 points for a stolen base against 3 for a single, projected for about 12% of lineups: that is the widest disagreement between the field and the engine anywhere on today's sheet, and it is why the Sims built more than half of the top-150 pool around him.

The Pitcher Slot: Chalk This Heavy Has To Earn It

FanDuel rosters one pitcher, so that single slot carries more of your lineup's variance than any stack decision, and today the field has already voted. Misiorowski at 38.1% ownership is not ordinary chalk. It is also not irrational: a 1.63 ERA and 0.73 WHIP with 195 strikeouts in 127 innings, a 13.82 K/9, and a 2.8% barrel rate allowed, so hitters are not squaring him up even when they connect. He gets Minnesota at home. But the board carries one honest wrinkle: Misiorowski is nowhere on the exposure panel, which bottoms out at 33.3%. All the free sheet proves is that the engine's optimal pool holds him somewhere below his own 38.1% ownership; how far below lives in the full data, and that uncertainty is itself a reason not to treat the chalk arm as a free square. The question is not whether he is good. It is whether you pay the salary and the ownership at the same time.

The board offers two ways out. Jesus Luzardo, second in projection at 34.89 with a 10.80 K/9, draws Toronto's Shane Bieber on the other side, and comes at 19.0% ownership, half the chalk. Cam Schlittler, third at 33.18 with a 2.26 ERA, faces Atlanta at 16.4%. Either arm keeps most of Misiorowski's projection and returns real leverage in a fifth of lineups instead of two fifths. The deep cut is Connor Prielipp, fourth in projection at 28.19 and fourth in leverage at 24.9%, which is a strange pair of facts until you see his assignment: he is the arm opposite Misiorowski in Milwaukee, a lefty with a 4.75 ERA that the field will not touch. Run the board's own subtraction and that 24.9% leverage means the optimal pool holds him in roughly a quarter of lineups, far more than his ERA feels like it deserves, and the gap is the whole play. He belongs in tournament entries built to be different, never in cash. Joey Cantillo, fifth at 27.65 against the White Sox, rounds out the panel. Full pitcher projections and ownership for the whole slate live in the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub.

Today's pitcher call: Misiorowski in cash and in tournaments where your bats carry the leverage. Luzardo is the one pivot that keeps elite strikeout projection at half the ownership. Prielipp is the tournament-only swing the leverage panel itself argues for.

The Kansas City Game Is The Whole Board

Now the promise from the top. Kansas City starts Randy Dobnak against the Cubs, and his 1.16 ERA is the least predictive number on today's slate: it comes from 31 innings in which he has struck out 15 hitters and walked 13. It works out to a 4.35 K/9 and a strikeout-to-walk ratio barely above one, and only four of his six appearances this season have been starts. An ERA that shiny sitting on peripherals that soft is exactly the kind of gap a simulation engine exists to find, and the Sims found it. Chicago is the board's top 4-stack at 24.0%, built on constant contact against an arm that misses nobody's bat.

The named Cubs tell you the shape of it. Crow-Armstrong, .287 with 26 home runs and 30 steals and a 12.1% barrel rate, bats left-handed against the righty and is the rare player who is chalk and leverage at once: 16.5% ownership, 46.0% exposure. Seiya Suzuki, fifth in ownership at 15.5% and fifth in exposure at 33.3%, brings 19 home runs. Michael Busch, the value panel's leader at 4.25, is a lefty with 68 walks, and walks matter on a site that pays them like singles. That is three of FanDuel's four allowed batters from one team, with the fourth spot open for the complete Cubs stack order in the DataHub tables linked above.

And on the other side of the same game stands Witt, who brings a 12.1% barrel rate and a .517 expected slugging of his own into the platoon edge against Cubs lefty Matthew Boyd. Stacking Chicago and rostering Witt is not a contradiction, but be clear about what it is: a bet on the afternoon itself. Witt scores when Kansas City gets to Boyd, the Cubs score when they get to Dobnak, and both cash in the same high-scoring game, which is how a game stack differs from a same-team stack, as the correlation strategy guide explains. Witt plus a Cubs 4-stack fills five of your eight bat slots from one ballpark, and today I am fine with that.

Boston Runs The Board's Other Big Stack

The second stack row is Boston at 22.7% against the Athletics' J.T. Ginn, and the interesting part is what the row lacks: an excuse. Ginn's 3.51 ERA carries none of Dobnak's soft peripherals, he strikes out roughly two hitters for every walk, and the Sims still built Red Sox stacks nearly as often as Cubs stacks. What the engine is buying is price, not a broken matchup. Ceddanne Rafaela, .288 with 15 home runs, is third in both exposure at 40.7% and leverage at 26.5%, which backs out to roughly 14% ownership the field has not caught up to. Be honest about his profile, though: a 5.6% barrel rate is less than half of what Witt and Crow-Armstrong bring, so this is a contact-and-speed case at a friendly number, not a power case. Jarren Duran, second in value at 4.23, is the salary story instead of the batting-line story: a value mark that high on a .202 hitter only happens at a price the site has already marked down, and 16 home runs with 17 steals of ceiling remain in the profile. He bats left-handed against the righty Ginn. A Red Sox 4-stack is the slate's second-best correlation play and my main alternative when I want to be lighter on the Kansas City game.

The rest of the stack board thins out fast, and the drop from 22.7% to 7.3% tells you the Sims see two great stacks and then a field of merely fine ones. Philadelphia at 7.3% gets Bieber, who has a 5.11 ERA and 1.68 WHIP across eight starts this season, and the Phillie who matters is already on the board: Kyle Schwarber, fourth in exposure at 36.7% and fifth in leverage at 23.3%, bats left-handed against him with 33 home runs and a 16.9% barrel rate. Milwaukee at 5.3% faces Prielipp and pairs naturally under Misiorowski, the same game covered from the side you already own. St. Louis at 4.7% draws Colorado's Michael Lorenzen and his 6.94 ERA, and that row explains the strangest corner of the sheet, which is next.

Read The Bottom Of The Value Panel Honestly

The value panel opens with two real hitters, Busch and Duran, and then turns into arithmetic. Cesar Prieto, third at 4.08, is hitless through nine games with the Cardinals this season. Jimmy Crooks, fourth at 4.04, is a .190 catcher. Randal Grichuk, fifth at 4.03, is hitting .194 without a home run in 16 games for the White Sox. Value is projected points per $1K of salary, and at the minimum-salary end of the pool the denominator does most of the work. These rows are not the engine telling you Prieto is a good hitter; they are the engine telling you he is nearly free.

What to do with that is straightforward. The two Cardinals only make sense inside the 4.7% St. Louis stack against Lorenzen, where cheap bats ride a good matchup and the savings buy Misiorowski. Grichuk carries an extra wrinkle: he is a right-handed bat drawing the platoon side against Cleveland lefty Joey Cantillo, the board's own fifth-projected pitcher, so rostering Grichuk in a Cantillo build is betting against yourself. Punts are for freeing salary, not for spending conviction, and the FanDuel and DraftKings differences cut both ways at this end of the pool: FanDuel pays a walk like a single, which keeps a cheap on-base bat closer to a mid-priced one than his batting line suggests, but the categories that actually separate lineups here, homers at 12 points and steals at 6, are exactly what a minimum-salary bat rarely brings.

Worked Example: Witt's Row Into A FanDuel Build

Take the board's most extreme row and build from it. Witt: 52.7% top-150 exposure, 40.9% leverage, roughly 12% implied ownership. Step by step:

1. Start with Witt. He is the single widest field-versus-Sims gap on the sheet, he holds the platoon edge against the lefty Boyd, and his 31 steals hit the 6-point stolen base payout as hard as anyone named today.
2. Fill the Cubs 4-stack. Crow-Armstrong, Suzuki, and Busch are the named core of the 24.0% row against Dobnak's 15-strikeout, 13-walk profile, and the fourth spot comes from the complete Cubs stack order in the DataHub tables linked above. That commits five of eight bat slots to Kauffman Stadium, both dugouts.
3. Decide the pitcher against your bats, not before them. Misiorowski conflicts with nothing above, and the MLB DFS Sims guide shows how the engine prices an arm across his full outcome range rather than one median line.
4. Spend the last three bat slots on the board's other leverage. Schwarber against Bieber is the best single-bat swing on the sheet, and a Rafaela-Duran Boston pairing keeps you connected to the 22.7% row without a full second stack, which FanDuel's four-batter cap encourages anyway.
5. Do the final check before the 1:35 PM ET lock. The board's earliest games break then, and a Sunday slate means rest-day surprises in posted batting orders. Confirm Witt and your Cubs are actually in the posted lineups before entry, because a leverage play on the bench scores zero.

Everything in that build comes from one engine. The Stokastic Sims play the slate tens of thousands of times with correlation intact, so a Busch walk, a Crow-Armstrong double, and a Witt steal land together the way they would in Kansas City. Stokastic's Ownership Projections run as a distribution rather than a single guess, which is what makes a leverage column possible, and the exposure panel is the top 150 lineups of the sim-ROI-ranked pool, with Boom/Bust separating the ceiling bats from the floor bats inside it. The cheat sheet you just read 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 full projections, Ownership Projections, stack orders, and the Sims themselves live.

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FAQ: Sunday Slate Questions

Is Jacob Misiorowski worth 38.1% ownership? Yes, with eyes open. A 1.63 ERA, 0.73 WHIP, and 13.82 K/9 is the best pitching line on the board by a distance. Just read the exposure panel honestly: he misses its 33.3% cutoff, so the Sims hold him under the field's number and treat him as the floor, not the edge. Pay the ownership if your bats carry the leverage.

Should I stack the Cubs or the Red Sox? Cubs first, and not because Boston is more owned; Rafaela backs out to roughly 14% against Crow-Armstrong's 16.5%. Chicago wins on the stack row itself, 24.0% to 22.7%, and on the matchup: an arm with 15 strikeouts against 13 walks is a softer underlying target than Ginn, who strikes out roughly two hitters for every walk. I weight Chicago and use Boston as the differentiating second look.

Where does Bobby Witt Jr. fit if I do not stack Kansas City? In more than half of my tournament builds, which is exactly where the optimal pool has him. Witt is a one-off, not a stack piece, in today's builds: the board never lists a Royals stack row, just the player. At roughly 12% implied ownership with the top exposure mark on the sheet, he fits Cubs builds, Boston builds, and everything between.

Are the cheap value bats actually playable? Only with a job to do. Prieto and Crooks are salary relief inside a St. Louis stack against Lorenzen's 6.94 ERA, and that is the whole case. Grichuk is the one to skip in any lineup that also rosters Cantillo, since one of them succeeding means the other did not.

The Side I Am Taking, And What Breaks It

Some sheets argue with the field about everything. This one argues about exactly two names and agrees on the rest. My Sunday runs through the Kansas City shortstop: Witt with the Cubs core in most entries, Luzardo replacing Misiorowski in the tranche where I want the pitcher slot to be the difference, Schwarber stapled to the builds that skip Kauffman entirely. Know what breaks it before you enter. A Sunday board means veterans rest, and if Witt is missing from the posted lineup the whole leverage case evaporates, which is why the final check in step five is not optional. And if Dobnak's 1.16 ERA proves sturdier this afternoon than his 15-to-13 strikeout-to-walk ratio suggests, the Cubs row was the day's trap chalk, which is the risk every stack built on peripherals accepts. The bottom of the value panel stays a tool, not a temptation. You must be 21+ to play. Tomorrow the board will argue about somebody new, which is exactly why it is worth reading fresh every morning.