MLB DFS Picks (8/16): Cease Leads DK & FD Lineups

Sunday's main slate is a top-heavy pitching board wearing an eight-game costume. On Stokastic's MLB DFS Live Before Lock, Eric "EMac" MacPherson spent the hour before lock making the same point in a dozen ways: there is one clear ace, a short list of viable SP2 arms behind him, and after that the whole build tips over to the bats. Below is the full read from the show: the pitchers he is jamming, the stacks he wants, and how the DraftKings and FanDuel boards diverge, plus one Marlins rookie who ended up in nearly every lineup he built.

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

In Summary

• Dylan Cease (Blue Jays) Is The Anchor Of The Slate, and EMac is at 55% exposure to match the field, because he expects Cease in nearly all of his hand-built lineups anyway. His case: a 36% strikeout rate against a Yankees lineup with seven hitters carrying a 24%-plus strikeout rate versus right-handers.
• Eury Perez (Marlins) And Christian Scott (Mets, $7,500 DK) Are The SP2 Options, at roughly 45% and 40%. Perez gets Great American Ball Park; Scott gets a Nationals lineup gutted by trades and injuries.
• Miami Is The Stack EMac Keeps Coming Back To, with rookie Agustin Ramirez ($3,600 DK) landing in nearly every build he made.
• The Other Stacks Are Philadelphia Against Dean Kremer, Arizona Against Bryce Elder, And The Mets Against Jake Irvin, each targeting a vulnerable starter.
• DraftKings Runs Eight Games; FanDuel Runs Nine, adding the 3 p.m. ET Cardinals–Cubs game, a difference that changes how concentrated your lineups get.

Watch The Video

EMac 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

Today's top MLB DFS pitcher is Dylan Cease (Blue Jays) against a strikeout-prone Yankees lineup, the one arm EMac is jamming on both sites, with Eury Perez (Marlins) and Christian Scott (Mets, $7,500 DK) as the SP2 options behind him. The stack he keeps returning to is the Miami Marlins against Reds lefty Nick Lodolo. The full pitcher pool with salaries, the four stacks he is targeting, and how DraftKings and FanDuel diverge on this eight-game board are below.

Today's MLB DFS Slate At A Glance

This is an eight-game main slate on DraftKings with a 1:35 p.m. ET first pitch, and everything on it runs through the MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub that the show uses live, so a "play" here means real lineup exposure, not just a projected score. Two games carry weather: EMac flagged scattered storms around Pittsburgh (not expected until later in the afternoon, and Paul Skenes was already pushed to Wednesday, so the Pirates are going bullpen) and a cell near Cleveland arriving around first pitch that could push the start back a couple of hours. Neither scared him off the slate. What shapes the build is the pitching board, where the drop-off after the top tier is steep.

Picking Your Pitchers

Dylan Cease (Blue Jays) is the arm EMac could not talk himself off. Cease has jumped from a great 2025 to a phenomenal 2026: a 36% strikeout rate, a full standard deviation above the 30% mark he posted last year, and a strikeouts-per-nine mark bettered only by Jacob Misiorowski among the league leaders. The matchup is strength-on-strength: the Yankees have seven hitters with a 24%-plus strikeout rate against righties, with only two of them (both at 16%) below that line. The risk is power: several of those Yankees hit for real thump, so a solo shot or three is on the table. EMac's math is that he can live with three solo homers as long as Cease pairs them with nine strikeouts and nothing else crosses.

Eury Perez (Marlins) is the SP2 he likes most. Perez has posted 25-plus DraftKings points in six of his last 11 starts, and he draws Cincinnati in Great American Ball Park, a hitter's park, but a Reds top six that has four bats striking out 27% or more against right-handers. Christian Scott (Mets, $7,500 DK) is the value alternative against a depleted Washington lineup: the Nationals traded away Luis Garcia Jr. and Curtis Mead, and James Wood is on the injured list, stripping three of the bats that powered their offense. EMac's one caution was Abimelec Ortiz, riding an unsustainable power surge (a .440 wOBA and .380 ISO in just 36 plate appearances) and a pinch-hit risk anyway.

Sean Burke (White Sox) is the honest fade. Burke jumped from a 22% strikeout rate last year to 27% this year, but Detroit offers only two real strikeout targets, Spencer Torkelson (32% versus righties) and rookie Max Clark (27% in 41 plate appearances), and at a five-figure salary he would need to beat his median projection by roughly 60% to pay off. The rest of the pool is streamer territory: Patrick Sandoval (Red Sox, $6,600 DK) slips in as a cheap dart, Michael Soroka gets a "remember me" spot against his old Atlanta club, though seven Braves lefties are his kryptonite, and Casey Mize (Padres, $8,600 DK), freshly traded from Detroit, does not miss enough bats to trust at that tag against Cleveland.

The row worth staring at is Drew Anderson. The Tigers' 32-year-old starter is back in the majors after two years in the KBO and three in Japan, a five-year gap, and he has topped out at 70 pitches this season, so EMac does not expect him to finish the fifth inning or qualify for the win. That is why a cheap arm against the White Sox still only earned 6% of his exposure.

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Top Stacks To Target

With the pitcher pool mostly settled, the stacks are where today's lineups actually get built, and the DraftKings MLB DFS cheat sheet tracks how the field is dividing its ownership across them.

Miami Marlins is the one EMac kept returning to, against Reds lefty Nick Lodolo, who is back from about a month lost to a blister on his left middle finger. The top of the Marlins order (Otto Lopez, Heriberto Hernandez, and rookie Agustin Ramirez) grades best, with Javier Sanoja and Esteury Ruiz lengthening the lineup. Philadelphia is the second stack, against Twins starter Dean Kremer: Kremer has been fine in two starts since joining Minnesota (two runs, three walks, nine strikeouts), but he gave up 14 runs in 10 innings across his final two starts before the move, and Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper anchor the Phillies top.

Arizona is the leverage stack, against Braves starter Bryce Elder, a survivor who allowed six, eight, five, and four runs against weaker offenses before giving up seven to the Mets, and EMac wants the Diamondbacks' lefties first, with Ketel Marte one of the bats he clicked into his builds. The Mets round out the board against Nationals starter Jake Irvin, back from a two-month shoulder injury with ugly recent numbers: 12 earned runs, six walks, and four home runs in his last 13.2 innings, with only eight strikeouts. Rookie A.J. Ewing is leading off ahead of Francisco Lindor, with rookie Carson Benge and Jared Young in prominent spots.

The Mets stack is the cleanest of the four to read: Irvin is not just hittable, he is walking people and leaving the ball up, which is why EMac is comfortable pairing New York bats with a same-slate arm rather than treating the pitcher and the stack as an either-or.

DraftKings Vs. FanDuel

The pitcher board is the same on both sites, but the game count is not. FanDuel adds the 3 p.m. ET Cardinals–Cubs game, which brings Edward Cabrera (Cubs) into the mix, and that is exactly the arm EMac wants to avoid on FanDuel. Cabrera is back from a hamstring injury on a rehab-start pitch count (43, 55, then 64 pitches), so figure roughly 75 today, which puts his FanDuel quality-start bonus in doubt. The extra game mostly matters for how you spread the cheaper bats; the FanDuel MLB DFS cheat sheet has the full pricing breakdown. On DraftKings, with the top two pitchers so popular, the trap is ending up with the same Cease-Perez pairing across too many lineups, so EMac deliberately kept each below the point where they collapse into one combination.

Example Lineup: EMac's Build

Here is the shape EMac is building around, in his own logic:

• Pitcher: Dylan Cease as the anchor, with a Perez or Christian Scott lineup or two that deliberately avoids Cease to break up the chalk pairing.
• Core Bat: Agustin Ramirez ($3,600 DK), the Marlins rookie who landed in nearly every build, a cheap way to get Miami exposure without spending up.
• Primary Stack: two or three Marlins bats (Lopez, Hernandez, Sanoja) against Lodolo.
• Leverage Stack: Arizona lefties out of the Elder game, a look the field is underweighting relative to the Miami and Mets chalk.
• Salary Relief: the Mets' cheap rookies (Ewing, Benge) against Irvin, freeing up money for the arms on top.

If you want the framework behind why a build looks like this (one primary stack, one leverage stack, cheap salary relief underneath), the guide to building winning MLB DFS lineups walks through the construction logic this lineup assumes.

The Bottom Line

This is a slate with one clear ace and a short bench behind him, so the decisions that separate your lineups are all downstream of Cease: how much Eury Perez and Christian Scott you mix in as your SP2, how deep you go on the Miami stack EMac could not stop building, and whether you take the Arizona leverage against Bryce Elder. Run it through the Stokastic DataHub for MLB as lineups confirm, cross-check the today's MLB DFS picks hub for the wider board, and let the ownership numbers pick your leverage spots before lock, the way EMac landed on 55% Cease and a Ramirez bat in nearly every build. New to the position abbreviations and salary logic here? The MLB DFS glossary covers the basics.

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