MLB DFS Picks Today (8/11): DraftKings & FanDuel Lineups

Tuesday's 15-game main slate is a two-pitcher slate wearing a 15-game costume. Eric Lindquist spent the better part of an hour on Stokastic's MLB DFS Live Before Lock trying to talk himself into pivots, and by the end he was right back where he started: two arms, built around them however you like. Below is the full read from the show, the pitchers he is jamming, the stacks he wants, and the home run he is chasing, built for both DraftKings and FanDuel.

Sean Burke — one of the featured players on today's slate.

In Summary

• Sean Burke (White Sox, $8,500 DK) And Dylan Cease (Blue Jays, $10,500 DK) Are The Slate. Eric is at or near 100% exposure to both on DraftKings and FanDuel, and he could not find a real pivot off either one.
• Blake Snell (Dodgers) And Hunter Brown (Astros) Are The Only Other Arms In His Pool, at 10% and 5% DK exposure. Everyone else he considered landed at zero.
• Junior Caminero And Chandler Simpson (Rays) Are Locks Regardless Of Stack Size, over 30% exposure each, even though Eric is fading the full five-man Tampa Bay stack.
• Texas Is The Chalk Stack Of The Night against Los Angeles Angels starter Ryan Johnson, sitting at 39% ownership league-wide.
• The Home Run Pick Is Hunter Goodman (Rockies) against Arizona rookie Mitch Bratt, an extreme fly-ball lefty making just his sixth big-league start.

Watch The Video

Eric breaks down the full slate live, with the Sims updating as confirmed lineups roll in. Watch the full show here: Watch on YouTube.

The Quick Answer

Tonight's top MLB DFS pitchers are Sean Burke (White Sox, $8,500 DK) vs. Cincinnati and Dylan Cease (Blue Jays, $10,500 DK) vs. Boston, the two arms Eric Lindquist is playing at or near full exposure on both DraftKings and FanDuel. The top stack is Texas Rangers bats against Los Angeles Angels starter Ryan Johnson. The full pitcher pool with salaries, the Tampa Bay and Arizona-Colorado stacks, and Eric's Hunter Goodman home run pick against Arizona rookie Mitch Bratt are below.

Today's MLB DFS Slate At A Glance

Everything on this slate runs through the Stokastic MLB Sims and DataHub that our experts use live, so a "play" here means real DraftKings or FanDuel lineup exposure, not just a projected score. That distinction matters more than usual tonight, because Eric spent a chunk of the show arguing with himself about pivots and losing every time. "There's not really pivots off of these two pitchers today," he said, and that verdict shapes the stacks, the home run pick, and even which site to play.

Picking Your Pitchers

Sean Burke (White Sox, $8,500 DK) is priced like a mid-rotation arm and pitching like the best strikeout arm on the board. He has carried double-digit strikeouts into his last two starts, and Eric's frustration with the tag was a running theme of the show: "he is way too good of a play at that tag." Burke gets Cincinnati tonight, a lineup that strikes out at a top-of-the-league clip.

Dylan Cease (Blue Jays, $10,500 DK) is the other half of the lock, now pitching for Toronto after his move from the National League. Eric put up his recent form unprompted (a 2.01 SIERA, 2.06 xFIP, 1.64 FIP and 1.14 RA), and none of it moved him off Cease even with Boston's lineup, including leadoff man Masataka Yoshida and Jarren Duran, looking live.

"There are still very little things that are going to get me off Dylan Cease today." Eric Lindquist, on staying the course even with a live Red Sox lineup.

That is the whole pitcher pool at real exposure. Blake Snell (Dodgers, $9,000 DK) gets 10%, with Eric leaning toward the over on his strikeout total against Kansas City. Hunter Brown (Astros) gets 5%, a much smaller stake because his strikeout rate has slipped from a 25.6% season mark down toward 20% over his last month, even in a soft San Francisco road matchup.

Every other arm he floated got a real look on air and still landed at 0% in his actual pool: Ryan Weathers against Seattle, Cody Bradford against the Angels, Cristopher Sánchez against St. Louis, and Arizona rookie Mitch Bratt. Bradford in particular he'd rather attack through a strikeout prop bet than roster outright.

Eric's read: "He is way too good of a play at that tag." A pitcher this good of a value at $8,500 is exactly the gap the DraftKings MLB DFS cheat sheet is built to catch before lock.

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Top Stacks To Target

With pitcher mostly settled, the stack decision is where tonight's lineups actually get built.

Tampa Bay Rays is the one Eric is treating differently than a normal stack. The field owns the full five-man Rays look at 17.2%, and he's staying below that, but two individual bats are locks regardless: Junior Caminero (TB), priced inside +200 to homer, and Chandler Simpson (TB), who Eric wants at "an eternal amount" of exposure. His case for Simpson: a .330 wOBA against just a .285 xwOBA, a 45-point gap that exists because expected-stats models don't credit his speed for the extra bases his legs create.

Texas Rangers is the slate's chalk stack, sitting at 39% ownership against Angels starter Ryan Johnson. Eric is still leaning in for roughly a quarter of his lineups, with Wyatt Langford, Evan Carter, Corey Seager and Brandon Nimmo all in play. If you want a refresher on why a chalky stack still earns a share of your builds even at high ownership, the top MLB DFS stacks and pitchers report tracks that math night to night.

Arizona and Colorado is a two-way leak in the same game. Tomoyuki Sugano (COL) gives Diamondbacks bats Ketel Marte, Corbin Carroll and Lars Nootbaar a real look, while the Rockies' own lineup is live against Arizona rookie Mitch Bratt on the other side (more on that below).

Baltimore rounds out the board against Minnesota's Bailey Ober, who Eric flagged for "major, major lefty issues" even in a park that isn't a big lefty-power venue. Jackson Holliday, Gunnar Henderson and Pete Alonso are the top three there.

The Home Run Pick

Eric's home run call of the night is Hunter Goodman (Rockies) against Mitch Bratt (Diamondbacks), and the case is the outlier the Sims are pricing in: Bratt is an extreme fly-ball arm (a 32% ground-ball rate) who has held home runs down so far only on a tiny big-league sample, with his expected numbers (xFIP climbing toward 4.59) pointing at regression. Chase Field grades as a mildly hitter-friendly HR park, and Eric wasn't shy about it: "I love, love, love, love, love Mitch Bratt" as the arm to attack.

DraftKings Vs. FanDuel

The pitcher lock is identical on both sites, since Burke and Cease travel everywhere. The difference is roster construction underneath them: DraftKings' Tampa Bay look needs five bodies, while FanDuel's cheaper board (the FanDuel MLB DFS cheat sheet has the full pricing breakdown) lets you get to a similar shape with fewer expensive fill-ins. That is why Eric called FanDuel "somehow worse" for ownership concentration even with the same two arms on top.

Example Lineup: Eric's Build

Here's the shape Eric is building around, in his own logic:

• Pitcher: Sean Burke ($8,500 DK) or Dylan Cease ($10,500 DK). The Sims are jamming both, so pick one per lineup rather than skip either.
• Anchor Bats: Junior Caminero and Chandler Simpson (TB), both well above 30% exposure regardless of what else is in the build.
• Chalk Stack Piece: two or three Texas Rangers bats (Langford, Carter, Seager, Nimmo) against Ryan Johnson.
• Leverage Stack: Arizona or Colorado bats out of the Sugano-Bratt game for a look the field is underweighting relative to Texas.
• Home Run Dart: Hunter Goodman against Bratt's fly-ball profile.

If you want the framework behind why a build looks like this (one chalk stack, one leverage stack, a home run dart on top), the guide to building winning MLB DFS lineups walks through the construction logic this lineup assumes.

The Bottom Line

This is a two-pitcher night no matter which site you play, so the lineup decisions that separate you are all downstream of Burke and Cease: how much Tampa Bay you take beyond Caminero and Simpson, how far into the Texas chalk you lean, and whether you take the shot on Hunter Goodman going deep against a rookie fly-ball arm. Run it through the Stokastic DataHub for MLB as lineups confirm, and let the ownership numbers pick your leverage spots before lock.

Ready to build your own? Stokastic Sims puts the same MLB projections, ownership and stacks data in your hands. Use code MLBLBL for 10% off any DFS or Props package.

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