MLB DFS Live Before Lock: July 20, 2026 Picks, Pitchers & Stacks

Here's the paradox behind our MLB DFS picks today for Monday's 15-game slate: the safest move is paying up for a strikeout arm, and the highest-upside move is going cheap on offense. Eric Lindquist ("Lindy") broke down the full board on MLB DFS Live Before Lock, and the pitching tier at the top is loaded. Four or five arms all have a case for a massive ceiling, which is exactly the spot where the Stokastic Sims earn their keep separating "good" from "the guy who actually wins you a lineup." The offense side inverts that logic entirely: the two teams Lindquist is most excited about, the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals, are barely rostered anywhere in the field.

There's one pitcher in this range who isn't the $12,000 headliner but might be the sharpest priced arm on the whole slate. We'll get to him once we work through the tier above him.

Jacob Misiorowski — one of the featured players on today's slate.

Watch The Video

This breakdown is pulled from the July 20 episode of MLB DFS Live Before Lock. Watch the full show on YouTube for Lindquist's complete lineup construction, live Q&A, and single-entry build.

In Summary

• Jacob Misiorowski (MIL) is $12,000 on DraftKings and still the priciest arm Lindquist is rostering: 46.7% sim ownership in his top-150 builds despite 13 days of rest off an arm-fatigue scare.
• Dylan Cease (TOR) and Jacob deGrom (TEX) round out the "pay up" tier; George Kirby (SEA) and Braxton Ashcraft (PIT) are the two Lindquist thinks the field is underrating.
• Ryan Weathers (NYY) is the slate's mega-chalk mid-tier arm; Lindquist is trimming his own exposure from an "unencumbered" 60% down to roughly 50%.
• The biggest offensive outlier: the Washington Nationals carry a 118 wRC+, best in MLB, into a hitter-friendly, 97-degree day at Coors Field against Kyle Freeland.
• The two stacks nobody's touching, Miami Marlins (at Houston, vs. Ronel Blanco) and St. Louis Cardinals (at the Angels, vs. José Soriano), are Lindquist's favorite contrarian builds.
• Build and shop all of it with the Stokastic MLB DFS Sims & projections DataHub for MLB.

The Expensive Arms: Who Actually Deserves The Salary

It's a pitching-forward slate: insane individual arms, insane weather environments (Coors, Wrigley with the wind out, Kauffman). Lindquist's read is that the bats you want are the expensive ones, because the ceiling in this pitching environment justifies paying up rather than nickel-and-diming into value bats.

Jacob Misiorowski (MIL) is the anchor. Yes, the arm-fatigue scare is real, and yes, $12,000 is a number that makes people uncomfortable rostering him blind. But it didn't show up in his last two outings (10 and 11 strikeouts), and he's had 13 days to recover. Lindquist has him in 46.7% of his top-150 sim builds and calls him a "calculated risk," not a dart throw.

Dylan Cease (TOR) gets the strikeout-equity nod against a Tampa Bay lineup that's tied with Toronto for the league's best team K-rate against right-handed pitching (19.2%). That team number undersells it: Cease's own splits are filthy. Hitters are batting .194 (37% K-rate) against him this season, and lefties specifically are striking out 35.8% of the time against a slider that grades as one of the best swing-and-miss pitches in baseball (25% swinging-strike rate). Andy Díaz and Junior Caminero don't chase much, but Jonathan Aranda and the rest of Tampa's lefty-heavy lineup are exactly the shape of hitters Cease was built to beat.

Jacob deGrom (TEX) is the wild card. He missed the All-Star Game with a glute issue and was on a limited pitch count (roughly 80) in his last start on the 7th, and hasn't pitched in the 13 days since. That's why he's sitting at just 12.7% sim ownership right now; Lindquist wants to push that closer to 20%, trimming it off Weathers' number to do it. The catch: his 15.5-outs prop is scary to lean on if you're using him as a single-pitcher site like FanDuel.

George Kirby (SEA) draws maybe the best pure matchup of the tier. Cincinnati strikes out at a 24.8% clip against right-handers (18.6% vs. lefties), and Kirby, the best Mariners starter outside of Bryce Miller, doesn't need elite raw stuff to take advantage of a lineup that's forced to run righty bats out against the grain of Coors-to-Seattle travel. Lindquist wants him in 15–20% of his builds.

The pecking order so far: Misiorowski anchors it at $12,000, Cease and deGrom split the strikeout-equity tier below him, and Kirby is the cheapest way into that same "elite matchup" bucket. Next up is the pitcher priced below all four who Lindquist likes more than his salary suggests.

The Outlier: Braxton Ashcraft's Curveball

Here's the arm Lindquist thinks is the most underappreciated of the expensive tier, the one promised above. Braxton Ashcraft (PIT) draws the New York Yankees, who roll out a lineup stacked seven-deep with left-handed bats (Trent Grisham among them). That matters specifically for Ashcraft because his ceiling is directly tied to volume of lefties faced: his curveball is, by pure pitch-grading models, the single best-graded curveball in baseball, and his slider has taken a real step forward over the last month (113 stuff-plus). He doesn't throw a changeup, which is unusual for a pitcher this effective against left-handed hitters. The curveball and slider are doing all the damage.

Lindquist is deploying Ashcraft in his single-entry lineup for today and wants him around 20–25% of his tournament builds, but with a caveat: he's saving Ashcraft mainly for lineups where he isn't also leaning on Yankee Stadium weather for a win-bonus angle elsewhere. On a slate full of $12,000 arms, he's the pitcher Lindquist keeps coming back to.

Ryan Weathers Is The Chalk: Trim, Don't Fade

Ryan Weathers (NYY, $8,700 FD) is the mid-tier arm running away with slate-wide ownership, and for good reason: he's facing seven Pittsburgh left-handed bats and pitching in better weather than the Yankees have seen most of this homestand: 79 degrees and sub-50% humidity tonight, compared to multiple recent series north of 90 degrees and 55% humidity. Cooler, drier air means the ball doesn't carry as far, which directly helps a pitcher who's given up real power this season (a .194 expected ISO allowed).

The risk with Weathers isn't the matchup, it's the ownership spiral: Lindquist is seeing him around 18–19% in the DataHub industry-wide right now, and worries that number balloons to 30% by lock. His answer is to trim his own exposure from an "unencumbered" 60% down to roughly 50%, spreading that other 10–12% into Ashcraft and the rest of the expensive tier rather than fading Weathers outright. He's still the highest-owned pitcher on his card, just not by as much as the field will have him.

Worked Example: Splitting Weathers' Exposure Across A 20-Lineup Pool

If we build a 20-lineup tournament pool the way Lindquist is framing it, here's how I'd translate his percentages into actual roster counts:

• Unencumbered Number: 60% of 20 lineups = Weathers in 12 of them.
• Lindquist's Adjusted Number: 50% of 20 lineups = Weathers in 10 of them.
• Where The Other 2 Lineups Go: into Braxton Ashcraft (his 20–25% target) and a mix of deGrom/Kirby, since those are the arms he's actively trying to push closer to their "deserved" ownership.

That's the mechanical version of "trim the chalk, don't fade it." Our two open slots aren't going to a random dart throw, they're going to the arm we already think is priced like a value play at $9,200.

Emmet Sheehan (LAD, vs. PHI) is the other mid-tier arm worth knowing: a 26.3% K-rate (26.9% vs. RHP) and a .240 ISO allowed (.187 expected) that should trend down if he keeps the ball on the ground against Philadelphia's lefties, Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber chief among them. Lindquist is capping him around 4–5% given the risk of the matchup, not the talent.

The Cheap Arms Worth Rostering

Two pitchers Lindquist is comfortable going cheap on: Andrew Abbott (CIN, vs. SEA), who gets a Mariners lineup forced to play four-plus lefties even with Julio Rodríguez back (around 5–6% of builds), and Kyle Leahy (STL, vs. LAA), his highest-owned cheapy at roughly 10%. Leahy isn't a talent bet. Lindquist is blunt that "Kyle Leahy sucks" — it's a matchup bet: the Angels post a 19.3% K-rate against right-handers, with Mike Trout (25%), Zach Neto (25%) and Yoán Moncada all in that range, and Leahy's ground-ball tendencies keep the ball in the yard against a lineup that doesn't have much power to punish mistakes with anyway.

DraftKings Vs. FanDuel: Where The Plan Changes

On DraftKings, the expensive tier runs Misiorowski (the anchor, ~40–50% of builds when you count the whole range), Cease, deGrom, Kirby and Ashcraft in that order, with Weathers capped at 50% in the mid-tier and Leahy/Abbott rounding out the cheap end.

FanDuel changes the math because there simply aren't enough affordable bats to make paying up for pitching an opportunity-cost problem. Lindquist has "routinely been paying up on FanDuel" all year. Cease is interesting there at roughly half his DraftKings ownership, and Ashcraft at $10,000 with only around 5% projected ownership is the site's best contrarian pitcher play. Cristopher Sánchez (PHI, vs. LAD) is a better fit on FanDuel specifically for that same reason, even in a difficult spot against the Dodgers. Pair Ashcraft with Weathers ($8,700) and you've got Lindquist's favorite FanDuel two-pitcher build.

If you're building around the Stokastic Sims either way, run your own numbers through the MLB DFS Sims & projections DataHub before lock. Ownership projections move fast once a slate like this gets real industry attention, and our guide to using the MLB DFS Sims walks through building MLB DFS lineups around exactly this kind of pitcher tier.

The trim, in one line: Weathers stays the highest-owned arm on the card, just at 50% instead of 60%, with the extra exposure flowing into Ashcraft.

Stacks: Coors, Wrigley Wind, And The Two Most Unowned Offenses On The Board

Here's where the outlier from the top of the show pays off. The Washington Nationals, a team that still doesn't feel like an offense, carry a 118 wRC+ into today, best in all of baseball, with a .175 ISO (4th-best) and the game's lowest walk rate mixed in. That profile lines up perfectly against Kyle Freeland at Coors Field: Freeland doesn't walk anybody, it's 97 degrees in Denver today, and a contact-heavy, free-swinging lineup in the thin air is exactly the matchup the Nationals' underlying numbers say they should be smashing. It's Lindquist's highest-owned stack of the day.

Detroit at Wrigley is the other popular side, and the pricing is the story: with the wind blowing out, DraftKings still has Zach McKinstry at $2,500, Colt Keith at $3,200 (he should see 2–3 at-bats before a likely defensive pull) and Kerry Carpenter at $3,600. That's too cheap for a lefty-heavy lineup getting a wind-aided park, which is exactly why Lindquist expects it to be popular, and exactly why he's still building around it anyway.

The two stacks Lindquist can't stop talking about are the ones nobody's touching. Miami carries a real .154 ISO and 103 wRC+ against right-handed pitching into a Houston park that Statcast grades top-6 in baseball for left-handed home runs, a profile Lindquist ties directly to the outlier idea from the top of the show: a good-on-paper offense meeting a park mismatch the field hasn't priced in. Ronel Blanco is the wild card (no real 2026 sample against lefties), which is exactly why the stack is sitting at effectively zero ownership. St. Louis is the same shape: José Soriano's ground-ball rate is only half his profile, and the fly-ball half of his mix has been getting hit hard, especially against lefties. The Sims have Cardinals bats at just 1.6% pool ownership and 8.7% stack exposure: the single biggest gap between what the model likes and what the field is playing on the entire board.

For more on why leaning into stacks the field is ignoring works, see Stokastic's contrarian MLB DFS stacking strategy and the correlation strategy guide. Both walk through the same logic Lindquist is using on Miami and St. Louis today.

Position-by-Position Value

A few one-off pieces Lindquist flagged outside the stacks above:

• Third Base: Austin Riley (ATL) is batting cleanup against JP Sears today after a big power year, the most interesting one-off at the position. Nolan Arenado (ARI, $3,300 DK) slots in more as part of the Diamondbacks stack than a standalone play.
• Outfield: Dylan Crews (WSH, $3,400 FD) has been hammering left-handed pitching; James Wood (WSH, $4,800 FD) anchors the Nationals stack; Pete Crow-Armstrong (CHC) has been a top-three hitter in baseball over the last month-plus and gets the Wrigley wind on top of it; Jackson Merrill (SD) is a value piece the Sims are lower on today than the field might expect.
• A Price-Discount Trap: Jake McCarthy (ARI) is legitimately great against lefties this year (a 146 wRC+ vs. LHP, up from a merely-fine 111 vs. RHP), but he isn't priced at a discount, so there are still better plays in his salary range even with that split in his favor.

Cash Game Locks

For single-entry and cash builds, Lindquist is straightforward: Riley Green (DET, $4,300 DK) is close to an auto-play given the Wrigley pricing above, and Kerry Carpenter slots in alongside him. On the Nationals side, mind the bench mix behind Luis García Jr.: if it's a close, late game, expect a pinch-hit swap that trims at-bats for the confirmed starters.