FanDuel MLB DFS Cheat Sheet For August 11: Projections, Ownership, And Stacks

Most nights a FanDuel MLB DFS cheat sheet gives you ingredients. Tonight's gives you the recipe. Across its six panels, the free board for the Tuesday, August 11 FanDuel main slate (twelve games, first pitch 7:05 p.m. ET in the Bronx) names a complete four-man Tampa Bay Rays stack, which happens to be exactly the number of batters FanDuel lets you take from one team. It also settles the only pitcher argument that matters on a one-pitcher site, and it does that by leaving the most popular arm on the slate off a panel he was supposed to headline. The fourth Ray is hiding in the last place most people look, at the bottom of the value column, and I will point at him when we get there.

Dylan Cease — one of the featured players on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

Play Sean Burke (35.76 projected FanDuel points) over Dylan Cease (41.30) in the single pitcher slot: the Sims put Burke in 42.0% of their top-150 lineups against 15.0% projected ownership, while Cease draws 40.9% of the field and does not crack the exposure panel at all. Build the bats around the full Rays 4-stack the board names: Junior Caminero (52.0% top-150 exposure, slate-best 32.0% leverage), Yandy Diaz, Chandler Simpson, and Cedric Mullins, all against an Athletics arm allowing 2.12 home runs per nine. Shohei Ohtani, second in exposure at 46.0% against just 17.3% ownership, is the one-off bat for a freed-up slot. The full six-panel board, the honest read on each row, and a worked Rays build are below.

Today's Board: Six Panels That Agree With Each Other

Every number in this article comes off today's free FanDuel cheat sheet, which the Stokastic Sims print fresh each morning by simulating this exact twelve-game slate tens of thousands of times. Here is the August 11 board in full:

The decoder, briefly, so the rest of this reads fast: 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, the raw material of tournament equity.

Start with the stack row, because 30.0% is not a normal number there. Tampa Bay's top 4-stack triples the second-place row, a gap wide enough that the engine is not whispering a lean; it is naming the game it wants your lineup living in.

The Pitcher Slot: One Arm, One Honest Answer

FanDuel rosters exactly one pitcher, which is why the entire projections panel is an arms race (all five names on it are tonight's starters) and why the slot decides more of your night than any stack call. The field has made its choice: Dylan Cease, at home for Toronto against Boston in the 7:07 p.m. ET game, draws 40.9% projected ownership, more than double anyone else on the panel. The merits are real. A 2.28 ERA, 184 strikeouts in 126.1 innings, a 13.11 K/9, and half a home run per nine is the best season line on the slate, and the 41.30 projection sits more than five points clear of the board.

Now look where Cease is not. The exposure panel's fifth spot belongs to Chandler Simpson at 36.0%, which means every arm and bat the Sims actually load up on clears that bar. Cease misses it. The optimal pool holds the slate's most popular pitcher below 36.0% while the field sits at 40.9%. Call it roughly five points of provable negative leverage, likely more since the sheet only shows the cutoff, on the one roster spot FanDuel refuses to let you double up. It is the quiet story of tonight's sheet.

Sean Burke is the loud one. The White Sox right-hander, home against Cincinnati at 7:40 p.m. ET, projects second at 35.76 and lands in 42.0% of the top-150 pool against 15.0% ownership, a 27.0% leverage number that makes him, not Cease, the arm the engine keeps buying. The season line holds up under the enthusiasm: a 3.08 ERA and 1.12 WHIP across 128.2 innings, with 144 strikeouts at better than one per inning. On a site where you cannot hedge the position, the Sims are telling you which single ticket they would punch, as the MLB DFS Sims guide explains in engine terms.

The rest of the panel is depth, not argument. Cristopher Sanchez (31.42), Philadelphia's lefty in St. Louis, has quietly out-pitched his attention all year with a 2.65 ERA and 174 strikeouts in 149.2 innings, and neither he nor the Yankees' Ryan Weathers (31.31, home against Seattle, 3.79 ERA over 121 innings) carries an exposure or leverage row, so both are concessions to variance rather than edges. And then there is Blake Snell at 31.03, which is a projection wearing a warning label: the Dodgers lefty has thrown three major-league innings all season, one start back on May 9, and tonight against Kansas City at 10:10 p.m. ET is his first big-league appearance in three months. A talent projection with a three-inning evidence base is exactly the bet a simulation declines, and the Sims left him off every panel that involves actually rostering him.

Tonight's pitcher call: Burke in tournaments, full stop. The board pairs its second-best projection with its third-best leverage number on the only site where the choice is binary. Cease is the cash-game floor, and he should do his winning in lineups that got different somewhere else.

The Rays Stack The Board Fills In For You

Here is what makes tonight's sheet unusual, and it is the payoff I promised in the opening. A FanDuel stack panel names teams, not players, and normally you finish the stack yourself. Tonight you do not have to. Tampa Bay's 30.0% row comes with all four bodies already scattered across the other panels: Junior Caminero first in exposure and leverage, Yandy Diaz fourth in leverage, Chandler Simpson fifth in exposure and first in value, and Cedric Mullins closing the value panel at 4.22: the fourth Ray, hiding at the bottom of the column exactly where I said he would be. Four names, and FanDuel's cap is four batters per team. The board did not suggest a stack; it filed a complete one.

The matchup explains the conviction. The Rays visit Sacramento at 9:40 p.m. ET to face Mason Barnett, an Athletics righty allowing 2.12 home runs per nine across 34 innings with a 5.56 ERA. Caminero is the hammer: .277 with 34 home runs and a .549 slugging mark, and 27 of those homers have come off right-handed pitching, where he slugs .560. Diaz is the on-base spine at .302 with 16 homers. The two lefties complete it from a different direction: Simpson hits .305 and has stolen 33 bases, and Mullins, hitting just .207, is there for the price and the platoon side, a lefty bat against a righty arm inside the game the engine most wants. One honest caveat belongs in the ledger: Sutter Health Park shades home-run production slightly downward, so this is a bet on the arm losing the inning before the park can save it: free baserunners, extra bases, and Simpson running wild on a battery already in trouble.

Ohtani Is What The Freed-Up Slots Are For

A four-man primary stack on FanDuel leaves four batter slots open, and the board's second-loudest row tells you where the first of them goes. Shohei Ohtani appears in 46.0% of the top-150 pool against 17.3% ownership, a 28.7% leverage gap on a hitter slashing .294 with 26 home runs and a .940 OPS, at home against Kansas City right-hander Michael Wacha in the slate's last window. On DraftKings' five-man stack format, a one-off superstar is a luxury; on FanDuel, where the shorter cap frees roster room by design, the one-off leverage bat is a structural feature, and the FanDuel and DraftKings differences guide covers why the two sites reward opposite instincts here.

The secondary stack rows fill the remaining slots. Arizona at 10.0% hosts Colorado's Tomoyuki Sugano, who has allowed 22 home runs this season, and the board names the Diamondback to build around: Corbin Carroll, fourth in exposure at 39.3%, a lefty with 16 homers and a .466 slug taking the platoon side against the righty. Texas, also at 10.0%, attacks the most generous arm on tonight's board, Angels righty Ryan Johnson, who has surrendered 2.31 homers per nine around a 7.11 ERA, while the Angels' own 6.7% row counter-stacks the same 9:38 p.m. ET game from the other dugout, against a Rangers lefty in Cody Bradford who has thrown just 4.1 innings this year. When one game carries two stack rows, the engine is calling it live from both sides; just do not roster an arm against your own bats, per the pairing logic in the correlation strategy guide. Baltimore rounds out the panel at 6.7% against Minnesota's Bailey Ober, and its named bat leads the next section.

The full stack orders, batting-order positions, and ownership for all twelve games live in the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub.

The Value Panel Pays Speed, Not Power

Tonight's value column opens with a hitter who has zero home runs, and on FanDuel that is not the joke it would be elsewhere. Chandler Simpson leads the slate at 4.51 projected points per $1K because FanDuel's scoring pays a stolen base 6 points, half a homer's 12, and pays a walk the same 3 points as a single. A .305 hitter with 33 steals is a FanDuel-specific asset: his singles, walks, and stolen bases compound in a format that flattens the gap between contact and power. The recurring lesson of this panel, covered in depth in the projections and ownership primer, is that value is scoring-system-shaped, which is why this board and the DraftKings version so rarely agree on it.

Read the rest of the column by job, not rank. Gunnar Henderson at 4.42 is the real one-off: a .212 average the market has already punished, 18 home runs that say the talent never moved, and the lefty's platoon edge against Ober. With Baltimore holding a stack row of its own, he can anchor a mini-stack instead of riding alone. Jeff McNeil at 4.27 is priced honestly and capped honestly; the Athletics second baseman draws Tampa Bay's Nick Martinez, whose 2.65 ERA across 129 innings is the hardest assignment any value name faces tonight. Carroll at 4.24 is the bargain the board endorses twice, fourth in value and fourth in exposure at 39.3% against 18.0% ownership: a gap that just misses the leverage panel's 23.1% cutoff but points the same direction. And Mullins at 4.22 is the callback: a .207 average means the salary is doing the arguing, but as the fourth Ray in the board's own stack, his job is to be cheap, take the platoon side, and let Caminero and Simpson do the scoring.

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Worked Example: The Board's Own Build

Take the sheet at its word and walk the loudest rows into a roster.

1. Punch Burke's ticket first. One pitcher slot, 27.0% leverage, a strikeout-per-inning season behind it. On FanDuel the arm is the single biggest click of the night, and tonight it is also the cheapest edge: 42.0% of optimal lineups against a 15.0% crowd.
2. File the complete Rays stack. Caminero at third, Diaz at first, Simpson and Mullins in the outfield. That is FanDuel's four-batter cap reached using only names the board itself printed, in the game it triple-weighted at 30.0%.
3. Give Ohtani a freed slot. The 28.7% leverage row is the biggest single-bat gap on the sheet after Caminero's, and a Dodgers one-off conflicts with nothing in a Rays-centered build.
4. Finish with a two-man mini. Carroll plus one more Diamondback from the DataHub's MLB stack orders keeps you correlated with Arizona's 10.0% row, or Henderson plus a second Oriole takes the Ober matchup instead. Either way the last bats arrive in pairs, not orphans.
5. Confirm the batting orders before 7:05 p.m. ET. Simpson's stolen bases and Mullins's price only score from inside the lineup, and the Rays' game does not lock until 9:40, but check them anyway. A leverage play on the bench is a zero.

Everything in that build comes out of one engine. The Stokastic Sims play tonight's twelve games tens of thousands of times with correlation intact, so a Simpson steal, a Diaz single, and a Caminero homer land together in the sim the way they would in Sacramento. Stokastic's Ownership Projections enter as a distribution rather than a single guess, which is what makes the leverage column computable at all, and the exposure panel is the top-150 cut of the ROI-ranked sim lineup pool, with Boom/Bust splitting the names that got there on ceiling from the ones that got there on floor.

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FAQ: August 11 Slate Questions

Is Dylan Cease worth 40.9% ownership on FanDuel tonight? In cash games, yes: a 2.28 ERA with a 13.11 K/9 is the slate's best floor, and floor is the assignment. In tournaments the sheet says no: the Sims hold him under the exposure panel's 36.0% cutoff while two of every five entrants pay up, which is negative leverage on the one slot you cannot diversify.

Who should I stack on FanDuel for the August 11 slate? Tampa Bay, and the board makes it easy: Caminero, Diaz, Simpson, and Mullins are all named across tonight's panels, a complete 4-stack against Mason Barnett's 2.12 home runs per nine. Arizona against Sugano and Texas against Ryan Johnson are the 10.0% secondary rows for mini-stacks.

Which value play is actually good tonight? Simpson, and he is a FanDuel specialist: 33 steals at 6 points apiece is how a zero-homer hitter leads a value panel. Henderson at 4.42 is the best one-off because his 18 home runs give him the ceiling Simpson's profile lacks. McNeil's 4.27 is the trap row: fairly priced, but facing the best pitcher any value name draws tonight.

Should I play Shohei Ohtani at 17.3% ownership? Yes, and more than the field will. A 46.0% optimal exposure against 17.3% ownership is the second-biggest leverage gap on the board, and on FanDuel the four-batter cap means a Rays build has room for him by design. He is the rare superstar the crowd is treating as a luxury on a night the engine treats him as a core.

Where I Land On The August 11 Slate

Tonight's board argues one thing six different ways: the slate's edge is concentrated, not scattered. The field is spending 40.9% of itself on an arm the optimal pool holds at a discount, while the engine pours its conviction into one game in Sacramento and one underpriced superstar in Los Angeles. So my builds are the board's build: Burke in the arm slot, the four named Rays, Ohtani in the first open seat, and Arizona or Baltimore pairs behind them. The risks are the honest kind: if Barnett survives six innings the whole thesis sinks with him, and if Cease throws the double-digit-strikeout game his season line keeps threatening, the chalk beats me at my own position. Holding that risk is what the 27-point leverage edge on Burke pays me for. You must be 18+ to play (19+ or 21+ where your state requires it). Play responsibly. This page covers August 11 only; tomorrow's board will argue about somebody new, and it will deserve a fresh read.