MLB DFS Picks Today: Live Before Lock Plays For Sunday, June 28

Sunday gives us a full 15-game MLB DFS main slate, and it is one of those days where nothing leaps off the board at you. There is no monster game total to chase and barely a natural stack forming on its own, so today's edge comes from picking the right pitchers and the right lefty-heavy spots instead of riding the obvious one. Here is how we read the Sunday, June 28 slate on our MLB DFS Live Before Lock show, with DraftKings and FanDuel plays built straight out of the Stokastic Sims.

In Summary

• The Slate Is Flat. Per the Stokastic MLB DataHub, Baltimore is the only team carrying an implied total above five runs. Everything else is bunched, so this is a pick-your-spots day, not a smash-the-top-stack day.
• Pitching Is Where You Separate. We are honing in on four starters: Jesus Luzardo, Hunter Brown, Gavin Williams, and Brandon Woodruff. We are not recommending the arms in the marginal spots.
• Stack The Lefties. The Orioles against Zach Littell are the chalk everyone will be on. The cheaper, more leverage-friendly lefty spots are the Phillies into a Mets bullpen game, the Pirates against Brady Singer, and the Marlins and Cardinals bats in warm St. Louis.
• Attack Kumar Rocker with the top of the Blue Jays order, and take the Nationals against Kyle Bradish in hitter-friendly Camden Yards.
• Home Run Leans: Coulson Montgomery and Taylor Ward.
• Weather: a right-field breeze in Minnesota that knocks down lefty power, and a short rain window around the DC area. No postponements expected.

Want more for today's slate? Pair this with today's MLB DFS Top Stacks and Pitchers, and bookmark our daily MLB DFS picks hub for the rest of the week.

Watch The Video

We walked the entire slate live and built the lineups on screen, including the FanDuel single-entry tricks at the end. Watch the full breakdown here: Watch on YouTube.

Build It Yourself With The Stokastic Sims

Every read below comes out of the same toolkit we use on the show: the MLB DataHub for team totals, top-stack odds, and top-value spots, the Top Stacks Tool to rank the offenses, and the Contest Sims to actually build and balance the portfolio. The Sims run the slate thousands of times, then let you set a global exposure cap and dial individual players up or down underneath it, which is exactly how you turn a flat board like this into a differentiated set of lineups.

Run the same build we did. The Stokastic Sims simulate the full slate up to thousands of times and generate your lineups with the exposures you want, so you are not trusting a single projected score. Use code MLBLBL for 15% off any DFS or Props package.

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Starting Pitchers We Trust

There are really only four arms worth building around today. Strikeouts are the currency, and these are the spots with enough upside to justify the salary.

Jesus Luzardo (Phillies) vs. Mets — The strikeouts carry him. Luzardo has piled up 30 strikeouts over his last three starts, and he did it in just 19 and two-thirds innings, so the swing-and-miss is loud even though it came with nine walks in that stretch. The Mets help: they are running out a righty-heavy lineup full of bats with high strikeout rates against left-handed pitching. That is a lot of whiff opportunity, and it makes Luzardo our top overall arm.

Hunter Brown (Astros) vs. Tigers — This is his third start back from a shoulder strain, and the pitch counts are trending the right way at 92 and then 85. Expect him around 90 pitches unless command gets away from him, which is the one risk: he has five walks in his 8.2 innings since returning. The upside is real, though, with 11 strikeouts and just one extra-base hit (a home run) across his eight and two-thirds innings since returning. He is priced in five figures on both DraftKings and FanDuel, but a Sunday day game after back-to-back nights means more reserves in the opposing Detroit lineup, which softens the matchup a touch.

Gavin Williams (Guardians) vs. Mariners — A buy-low. Williams started the season strong, then hit a rough patch with a recent run of three, four, seven, and two earned runs across his last handful of starts, including two outings against the Yankees and one against Milwaukee. Those are good offenses, so we give him a partial mulligan. The catch is run support: with Cleveland banged up, wins have been hard to come by, so he profiles more as a strikeout-and-ratios play than a win-equity play.

Brandon Woodruff (Brewers) vs. Cubs — Back from six weeks with shoulder inflammation, Woodruff just struck out 10 against Cincinnati on only 79 pitches. We would not bank on that efficiency repeating, but something around 85 pitches and a half-dozen punchouts is very much in play. He is the better play on DraftKings than FanDuel, and he draws a tougher matchup against a solid Cubs lineup, so treat him as a leverage SP2 rather than a lock.

A note on the spots we are fading: the arms just back from injury with short leashes (think a Jack Flaherty type, who we do not trust to go deep here) are easy to leave alone today. If you cannot count on a pitcher to clear five innings, the strikeout ceiling is not there.

The Stacks: Lefties Lead The Way

With totals this compressed, you are choosing between the popular Baltimore stack and the cheaper, lower-owned lefty spots that give you leverage.

Baltimore Orioles vs. Zach Littell (the chalk). The Orioles own the only team total above five, and Littell has surrendered 21 home runs this season, among the most in baseball. Everyone is going to be on the Birdland bats led by Gunnar Henderson, and that is fine: it is the best raw spot. Just know you are buying the field's favorite stack. If you want a home run angle here, you can shop the MLB home run props on OddsShopper before they move.

Toronto Blue Jays vs. Kumar Rocker. This is the spot we like most for leverage off Baltimore. Rocker put up nine strikeouts in five innings last time out after an opener, but we are happy to attack him with the top of the Toronto order, George Springer and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. included. On FanDuel even the Toronto righties are cheap, so you can extend the stack deeper there.

Philadelphia Phillies lefties into a Mets bullpen game. The Mets are opening with Cionel Perez for a couple of innings, then handing it to multi-inning arms who already threw earlier in the week. That sets up well for the Philly left-handed bats. We like a three-man lefty stack on DraftKings; on FanDuel the righties are cheap enough that you can mix and match through the top six.

Pittsburgh Pirates lefties vs. Brady Singer. Singer is a good pitcher having a rough season, and the top-five Pirates lefties are the play against him, with a slight weather note to monitor.

Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals lefties. Both teams are pushing toward a five-run total in warm, humid St. Louis, which is good hitting weather. Both starters lean ground-ball, so we prefer three-man lefty stacks here rather than forcing a five-stack that a couple of double plays can erase. The right-handed bats at the top of each order work as secondary pieces.

Two more to mix in: the Washington Nationals against Kyle Bradish in hitter-friendly Camden Yards (Washington still leads the league in runs scored, and Bradish is talented but inconsistent), and the Minnesota lefties plus Byron Buxton, keeping in mind that right-field breeze trims some lefty power.

Value Bats And Home Run Leans

On a flat slate, a couple of broken prices do real work for your roster construction.

Value of the day: Trea Turner at $2,900 on FanDuel is a broken price for his recent production, and he will end up in a ton of lineups on his own.

For home runs, the two names we keep coming back to are Coulson Montgomery and Taylor Ward. Both fit the leverage theme: they are not the obvious Baltimore bats, so they give you a different path to a slate-winning ceiling. You can cross-check the market on the OddsShopper home run props to see where the books price them before you lock.

Example: A Small-Field FanDuel Build

Here is one concrete lineup we built live for FanDuel's smaller single-entry contests, the ones with roughly 100 to 250 entrants where a top-1% lineup can win outright. We anchored it to Hunter Brown and stacked his own Astros bats around him for same-game correlation: if Brown is pitching well, Houston is probably scoring, so we paired him with Yordan Alvarez, Christian Walker, and Isaac Paredes. In these smaller fields you do not have to force a full five-stack. A tight pitcher-plus-mini-stack, rounded out with a few one-off bats like Trea Turner at his broken FanDuel price, gets you enough correlation without drowning in the chalk. That is the single-entry trick the contest size rewards, and it is the opposite of how you would attack a 150-max where the goal is a wide spread of stacks.

How We Turn A Flat Slate Into An Edge

This is the part that matters on a day with no obvious answer. Three things we actually do in the Contest Sims:

• Set The Pitcher Cutoff First. Decide where your arms stop, then cap them. On the two-pitcher sites we usually land the top arms around 30 to 40 percent and let the SP2 differentiation come from the cheaper spots.
• Spread The Stacks On Purpose. Rather than blindly accepting the optimal five-man build on every lineup, we mix exposures to get a wider variety of stack combinations. That widespread set is what produced a second-place finish in FanDuel's $22,220 Max the day before, with lineups scattered across the tournament by design.
• Check The Bottom Of Your Exposure Report. When you set a hard global cap, players you wanted can quietly disappear from the portfolio. Glance at the bottom of the list and give a couple of clicks to the arms and bats you do not want falling out.

Baseball is the most variant sport we play, so the goal is not to be perfect on one lineup. It is to be a little different from the field in spots you can defend. From there, you can see exactly how far above or below the field you sit at every position, then adjust until the portfolio looks the way you want.

Want the projections, ownership, and Sims behind every play above? Use code MLBLBL for 15% off any DFS or Props package at Stokastic.

Build your Sunday lineups

FAQ

Who are the best MLB DFS pitchers for Sunday, June 28? Our four favorites are Jesus Luzardo, Hunter Brown, Gavin Williams, and Brandon Woodruff. Luzardo is the top overall arm on strikeout upside against a whiff-prone Mets lineup.

What is the best stack on the slate? The Baltimore Orioles against Zach Littell are the highest-total, highest-owned stack. For leverage, the Toronto Blue Jays against Kumar Rocker and the Philadelphia lefties into the Mets bullpen game are our preferred lower-owned spots.

Should I play DraftKings or FanDuel today? Both. The lefty stacks extend cheaper on FanDuel, while a few arms like Brandon Woodruff grade out better on DraftKings. Build for each site rather than copying one lineup across both.

How do you decide your exposures on a flat slate? We set a global exposure cap in the Stokastic Sims, then dial individual players up or down underneath it, intentionally spreading stack combinations to get differentiation. The Sims show whether you are above or below the field at every spot.

The Bottom Line

There is no slam-dunk on Sunday, June 28, and that is the opportunity. Anchor your pitching to Luzardo, take a leverage shot off the Baltimore chalk with the Blue Jays or Phillies lefties, grab the broken-price value, and let the Sims build you a portfolio that is a touch different from everyone else. Run it through the Stokastic MLB Sims and use code MLBLBL for 15% off any DFS or Props package, and you will have today's plays plus the tool that built them. For more, browse all our DFS articles.