FanDuel MLB DFS Cheat Sheet For August 13: Projections, Ownership, And Stacks

Most nights the expensive names carry the story. Tonight's free FanDuel MLB DFS cheat sheet buries its edge on the cheap side of the board, and that changes how you build. Across the six games on the August 13 board, the two loudest leverage plays the Stokastic Sims print are a $4,100 shortstop and a $2,900 star the field has all but forgotten. The single pitcher slot, meanwhile, is not a coin flip between two aces so much as a question of whether you pay up for the chalk or take the $8,400 arm the Sims quietly keep buying. The team the crowd has abandoned is the one the engine likes most per dollar, and I will point at it when we reach the stacks.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr — one of the featured players on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

On tonight's six-game FanDuel slate, the Sims pour their conviction into inexpensive bats: CJ Abrams ($4,100, Nationals) leads the entire board in both optimal exposure (45.3%) and leverage (24.0%), and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. ($2,900, Blue Jays) is the biggest bargain-priced leverage bat at 22.4% against just 5.6% projected ownership. In the single pitcher slot, Logan Gilbert ($9,400) owns the top projection but the field is already heavily on him at 28.4%, so Braxton Ashcraft ($8,400) is the leverage arm the engine prefers. The full five panels the board printed, the four stacks hiding in the exposure column, and a worked CJ Abrams build are below.

Today's Board: What The Five Panels Say About The August 13 Slate

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 six-game slate tens of thousands of times. Here is the August 13 board, top five in each panel:

The decoder, briefly, so the rest reads fast: Proj FP is median projected FanDuel points, Own% is projected field ownership, Value is projected points per $1,000 of salary, top-150 exposure is how often a player lands in the 150 highest sim-ROI lineups, and Lev% is built from the gap between that optimal exposure and the field's ownership, which is the raw material of tournament equity.

Start with the exposure column, because the top of it is not close. CJ Abrams shows up in 45.3% of the top-150 pool, more than ten points clear of Jose Ramirez in second, and he leads the leverage panel too. When one name tops both the "how often the Sims use him" list and the "how underpriced his ownership is" list, the board is not offering a lean; it is naming a cornerstone.

The Pitcher Slot: One Arm, Three Ways To Play It

FanDuel rosters exactly one pitcher, which is why the entire projections panel is an arms race and why the slot decides more of your night than any single bat. Look at the numbers: all five projection leaders are starters, and the top one (Gilbert, 33.25) outscores the board's best hitter (Pete Crow-Armstrong, 13.11) by roughly two and a half times. On a one-pitcher site, that lone arm both carries your ceiling and eats a large slice of salary, so this is the choice to get right first.

The field has made the safe call. Logan Gilbert, Seattle's righty in the Bronx against the Yankees, draws 28.4% projected ownership on the slate's top projection. The problem is that the price of admission has already caught up to him: his 29.3% optimal exposure barely clears his ownership, a 0.6% leverage figure that means the crowd is paying full freight for the chalk. Max Fried, the Yankees' lefty starting the other half of that same game, is the mirror image at 32.00 projected with a slightly friendlier 3.8% leverage. Since the format rosters just one arm, you can only pick one of them, and whichever you take, you do not want to stack the other's lineup against him.

Braxton Ashcraft is the quiet answer. The Pirates' righty projects fifth at 28.62 but lands in 16.7% of the top-150 pool against just 7.2% ownership, an 8.8% leverage number that is the best of any pitcher on the board. At $8,400 he also comes in a full $1,000 under Gilbert, which frees the salary to reach a bat like Abrams without punting a hitter slot elsewhere, the way the MLB DFS Sims guide walks through in engine terms. It is the single-pitcher trade the board is quietly offering: pay up for the safest score, or take the cheaper arm the Sims keep buying and spend the savings on offense.

The trap to see clearly: Payton Tolle carries the highest salary on the board at $10,000 and the fourth-best projection at 29.26, and the field has bought in at 15.2% ownership. The Sims want him in 2.0% of lineups. That minus-30.5% simulated ROI is the worst mark of any pitcher here, and it is the reason a certain lineup leads the leverage bats.

The Leverage Bats: CJ Abrams And Vladimir Guerrero Jr. Lead The Board

The two names atop the leverage panel are cheap, and that is the whole point on FanDuel. CJ Abrams headlines everything: 45.3% optimal exposure, 24.0% leverage, $4,100 in salary, and an 11.87 projection that ranks among the top hitter marks on the board. The Nationals draw the Cubs' Kevin Gausman, and at 21.0% ownership Abrams is popular without being chalk, the rare case where the most-backed player in the Sims is not yet the most-owned in the field.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is the sharper edge. He appears in 28.7% of the top-150 pool against just 5.6% projected ownership, a 22.4% leverage gap that is second only to Abrams, and he costs all of $2,900. He also carries the highest simulated ROI of any bat on the board at plus-3.9%, one of only three players the Sims project in the black. A hitter this good is priced like a bench piece because the field has walked past him, and that mispricing is where the leverage comes from. The reason ties straight back to the pitcher panel: the Blue Jays face Payton Tolle, the $10,000 arm the engine wants almost nowhere, and Toronto is the offense the Sims most expect to make him pay. George Springer is the next Blue Jay on the leverage board at 16.0% and $2,900, so the two of them form the cheapest high-leverage stack on the slate.

The lesson for a FanDuel build is that leverage and salary relief are arriving together tonight. When two of the board's top-four leverage bats cost $2,900 apiece, you can afford the ace and the stack in the same lineup, which is not usually how a slate breaks.

Reading The Stacks Without A Stack Panel

Here is the one thing tonight's sheet does not hand you: a stack-percentage panel. Rather than invent numbers the board did not print, I read the stacks straight off the top-150 exposure column, counting which teams the Sims load up on bat by bat. Four offenses cluster hard, and FanDuel caps you at four batters from any single team, so each of these tops out at exactly a full primary stack:

The Yankees are the deepest of the four, with five bats at or above 18% exposure and every one of them cheap: Jazz Chisholm at $3,000 (19.4% leverage, third on the whole board), Luis Garcia Jr. at $3,100 (14.4% leverage, fifth), Spencer Jones at $2,600, Trent Grisham at $3,200, and Ben Rice at $3,600. Those are four viable cores out of five candidates, all under-owned because the field is busy rostering Gilbert rather than the bats hitting against him. If you play Gilbert in your one pitcher slot, this stack is off the table for you, since you never want your arm and your bats fighting each other, a pairing rule the correlation strategy guide covers in full. That is exactly why Ashcraft, in a different game, is such a clean pitcher pairing for a Yankees build.

The abandoned team I promised up top is Toronto. The Blue Jays sit fourth here only because their names are cheaper and fewer, but on a per-dollar basis they are the highest-leverage stack on the slate, with Guerrero and Springer costing $2,900 each into a matchup the Sims openly distrust. Washington and Cleveland are the more balanced builds, each fronted by a top-two exposure bat (Abrams, Ramirez) with three affordable supporting pieces. The full batting orders, ownership, and stack correlations for all six games live in the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub.

Chalk, Value, And How Hard To Fade

This is where the two big sites diverge most, and it is worth knowing the FanDuel and DraftKings differences before you fade too hard: FanDuel's one-pitcher slot and four-batter cap leave a lineup less room to separate on a single contrarian call than DraftKings' two-pitcher, five-batter format does, which shrinks the payoff for fading a popular bat. That matters tonight because the chalk is concentrated. Pete Crow-Armstrong tops the ownership panel at 31.9% on the board's best hitter projection (13.11), and Elly De La Cruz sits at 24.2%. Both are fine players in a vacuum, but both carry negative or near-zero leverage (minus-0.9% for Crow-Armstrong, plus-0.8% for De La Cruz), meaning the field has already priced in the upside. On a slate this top-heavy with chalk, paying up for the most-owned bat is how you end up with the same lineup as everyone else. I would rather take the Sims' cheaper leverage names and let the crowd crowd itself.

The value panel rewards the same instinct. Its raw leaders are two $2,400-to-$2,500 punts, Randal Grichuk (4.24 points per $1K) and Brenton Doyle (4.23), but the Sims back neither heavily (14.0% and 8.0% exposure), so treat them as salary-savers rather than centerpieces. The value names that actually matter are the ones doubling as stack pieces: Abimelec Ortiz at $2,400 (3.88 points per $1K) sits third on the value panel and inside the Nationals stack, and Jose Tena ($2,400, 3.77) hands that same Washington lineup a second sub-$2,500 option at the Gausman matchup. Jose Ramirez is the cleaner target still: at $3,300 he sits outside the value top five (3.65) but ranks second on the whole board in exposure, so he is the rare name that is cheap, sim-backed, and a stack piece at once. When a value play is also a heavily-used play and also a stack anchor, that is the row to build around, not a random cheap bat with a pretty ratio.

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Worked Example: Building Around CJ Abrams

Take the loudest row on the board and walk it into an actual FanDuel roster.

1. Anchor on Abrams. He is the board's No. 1 in exposure and leverage at $4,100, so he goes in at shortstop first and the rest of the build bends around his Nationals game.
2. Fill the primary stack. FanDuel lets you take four bats from one team, so add three more Nationals from the exposure list: Abimelec Ortiz ($2,400) in the C/1B slot, plus Daylen Lile ($3,000) and Dylan Crews ($2,900) in the outfield, all facing Gausman. Together with Abrams that is a full four-man Washington core.
3. Add the cheap leverage pair. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. ($2,900) takes the UTIL slot, since Ortiz already holds C/1B, and George Springer ($2,900) is your third outfielder. The two bring the slate's second- and fourth-best leverage against Payton Tolle, the arm the Sims fade hardest.
4. Complete the infield. Second base and third base are still open, so fill them with Jazz Chisholm ($3,000, the board's No. 3 leverage bat) at 2B and Jose Ramirez ($3,300, its No. 2 exposure bat) at 3B, each in a different game than the rest of your build.
5. Pick the pitcher that does not fight your bats. Braxton Ashcraft ($8,400) is in a different game than all eight hitters, so he pairs cleanly. The nine spots run $32,900, leaving a cushion under the cap; Gilbert scores more on paper but pins you into his game and his ownership.
6. Confirm the lineups before first pitch. Abrams, Guerrero, and the rest only score from inside the batting order, and a leverage bat on the bench is a zero. Check the cards before lock.

Everything in that build comes out of one engine. The Stokastic Sims play tonight's six games tens of thousands of times with correlation intact, so an Abrams single, a Lile walk, and a Crews home run land together in the sim the way they would in the actual game. 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 slice of the ROI-ranked lineup pool, with Boom/Bust separating the names that got there on ceiling from the ones that got there on floor.

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FAQ: August 13 Slate Questions

Who is the best FanDuel stack for the August 13 slate? Read it off the exposure column, since the board has no stack panel tonight: the Yankees are the deepest at five bats at or above 18% exposure, all cheap and all under-owned because the field is on Gilbert instead. Washington behind CJ Abrams and Toronto behind Vladimir Guerrero Jr. are the two best per-dollar options, the latter into a matchup the Sims openly distrust.

Is Pete Crow-Armstrong worth 31.9% ownership on FanDuel tonight? In cash games his 13.11 median is the best hitter mark on the slate, the safest bat you can roster. In tournaments the sheet says fade: he tops the ownership panel with minus-0.9% leverage, so you would be paying up for the most popular bat on the slate on a format that already flattens his edge.

Which pitcher is the value play? Braxton Ashcraft at $8,400. He carries the best leverage of any arm on the board (8.8%) at just 7.2% ownership, and being $1,000 cheaper than Logan Gilbert frees the salary to afford the leverage bats. Avoid Payton Tolle at $10,000 despite the projection; his minus-30.5% simulated ROI is the worst on the slate.

Is the CJ Abrams chalk worth it? Yes, and he is the exception to the fade-the-chalk rule tonight. He is the only name that tops both the exposure and leverage panels, so unlike Pete Crow-Armstrong he plays as a core in cash and tournaments alike rather than a chalk you have to get different from.

Where I Land On The August 13 Slate

Tonight's board argues one thing from every direction: the edge is on the cheap end. The field is spending its salary on Gilbert and Crow-Armstrong while the Sims pour exposure into a $4,100 shortstop, a pair of $2,900 leverage bats, and an $8,400 arm nobody wants. So my builds follow the board: Abrams as the anchor, a four-man Nationals or Yankees core, the Guerrero-Springer pair as the pivot into Toronto, and Ashcraft in the one slot FanDuel gives me to make a mistake at. The risks are the honest kind. If Tolle finally throws the game his salary implies, the Blue Jays leverage sinks with him, and if Gilbert spins the shutout his projection keeps threatening, the chalk beats me at my own position. Holding that risk is what the leverage pays for. You must be 21+ to play where DFS requires it; play responsibly. This page covers August 13 only, and tomorrow's board will name someone new.