MLB DFS Picks Today: June 19 DraftKings Plays

If you fire single lineups into MLB tournaments, you know the drill on a big Friday: 12 games on the main DraftKings slate, 24 teams in play, and far more good pitchers and stacks than one lineup can hold. On a slate this wide, the Stokastic Sims earn their keep, doing the heavy lifting so you are not guessing your way to a final roster. On the Perfect Lineup show, we built one tournament play from scratch, and the read came down to three calls: pay up for an elite arm at home, get weird at SP2, and pay for the bats the field is underrating.

This is the actual board we attacked, with the real DraftKings salaries and the real ownership the Top Stacks tool was showing this morning. The point is the why behind each name, the logic that holds up when a 12-gamer gives you a dozen directions to go. Our MLB DFS strategy guide covers the core principles for free; this piece shows them applied to one specific slate.

In Summary

• 12-game Friday main slate, 24 teams, so value is everywhere and the lineup combinations are wide open.
• Jacob deGrom ($10,000) is the SP1 anchor at home against a Padres offense that ranks dead last against right-handed pitching by weighted on-base average.
• We are fading Jacob Misiorowski ($12,500) on this one lineup, not on the slate. He is the best pitcher on the board; the Sims just had him in only 58% of optimal builds, and deGrom is $2,500 cheaper.
• Tatsuya Imai ($6,000) is the contrarian SP2, ranked number one in value in the DataHub against a Guardians lineup that is dead last in ISO and home runs versus righties.
• The Athletics are our number one stack against Angels righty Jose Soriano: number two in Top Stacks, only 12th in projected ownership. That ownership gap is the edge.
• New to Stokastic? Code PERFECT10 takes 10% off any Stokastic Sims plan after your free look at the tools.

Watch: The Perfect Lineup (June 19 MLB DFS)

We build the full single-lineup tournament play in real time, including the deGrom logic, the Imai gamble, and the Athletics stack construction. Watch the whole thing here: Watch on YouTube.

SP1: Jacob deGrom Is Worth Paying Up For

Start with the spot we feel best about. Jacob deGrom is home at $10,000 against the San Diego Padres, and this is not the same Padres offense that scared people in past seasons. With Luis Arraez and his 4% strikeout rate out of the lineup, the team strikeout rate climbs in a hurry, and the Padres have gone from 25th last season to top-10 in strikeout rate on their active roster against right-handed pitching. Against righties specifically they are dead last in weighted on-base average and 24th in ISO, with only the Red Sox worse in wRC+. There is no power and there is rising swing-and-miss, which is the exact profile you want to attack.

deGrom backs that matchup up with the stuff to exploit it. He carries a 16.9% swinging strike rate, second in all of baseball, a sub-5% walk rate, and a strikeout rate flirting with 30%. Pair the elite bat-missing with a strong strikeout prop and a low implied total for San Diego, and the floor and ceiling both look great. On a one-lineup build, that combination is worth the price.

The Misiorowski Fade: A Slate Call, Not a Slander

Here is the part that will test your patience: we are off Jacob Misiorowski on this lineup. To be clear, that is a one-lineup decision, not a take on his ability. At $12,500 he is the best pitcher on the slate and arguably in baseball right now. He owns a 17% swinging strike rate, the highest in the league, and unless he completely unravels he is the NL Cy Young favorite even over Cristopher Sanchez, who just ran off more than 50 consecutive scoreless innings.

So why fade him here? When we ran the Sims this morning, Misiorowski showed up in 58% of the optimal lineups. It is a lot, but it also means more than 40% of builds did not include him, and the biggest reason is the man one tier down. deGrom is right behind Misiorowski at a 16.9% swinging strike rate, they are one and two in baseball, and you save $2,500 to roster him in a comparable spot. On a 12-game slate where you can spend that savings on bats, the discount is the play for this single lineup. We will get to plenty of Misiorowski in other builds.

SP2: The Tatsuya Imai Gamble

This is the call that will lose the squeamish, so hear it out. Tatsuya Imai at $6,000 is the contrarian SP2, and the warts are real: an 18% home-run-to-fly-ball rate, a 15.3% walk rate, and a track record that swings from sharp to a first-inning exit, like the one he had against the Royals five days ago. He gets into trouble when his command wanders, and that risk is live.

The case for him is the matchup plus the tools. Imai still runs a 24% strikeout rate, a 12% swinging strike rate, and a 50% ground ball rate, and he draws a Cleveland Guardians lineup that is dead last in ISO against righties, dead last in home runs against righties, and tied with the Padres for the 10th-highest strikeout rate. The Stokastic DataHub had him number one in value on the slate, eighth in top-two-pitcher probability, and ninth in projected fantasy points while sitting as the fourth-cheapest arm on the board. The only pitchers cheaper than him are two arms in Coors Field and Rhett Lowder at Yankee Stadium, so the cheap-and-usable list is short. Sometimes you trust the tools and let the strikeout floor against a punchless lineup carry it.

The Stack: Why the Athletics Are Our Number One Stack

Time to pay for some bats. We are going to the Athletics against Angels righty Jose Soriano, and it will be expensive, but the profile is worth it. Soriano is a lot of everything: strikeouts, walks, and some hard contact, with his home-run rate rising and falling year to year. That variance is the opening. The Athletics rank eighth in wRC+ against righties, 26th in strikeout rate, so they hit and they rarely punch out, and they add seventh in overall wRC and 12th in ISO. This is a legitimate offense getting a pitcher who can be had.

The numbers are why this is the top stack, not a hunch. New to building team stacks? Our MLB DFS stacking guide explains why batting-order correlation matters. The Top Stacks tool had the Athletics number two in top stack and sixth in stack score, but only 12th in projected ownership. That is the appealing piece: you are paying up for a real spot that the field is underrating. The one knock is price, since the Athletics also sit 16th in top value, so fitting five of them takes work.

Construction starts with the lefties up top. Here are the bats the show put an exact salary on:

We anchored a five-man Athletics stack around those four, leaning on the lefty bats against Soriano and rounding it out with one more sub-$3,000 bat from the bottom of their order to make the salary work. Pay up for the bats the field is fading, then let the cheap order pieces fill in around them.

Worked Example: Building It in the Single Lineup Simulator

Here is the actual build. We opened the single lineup simulator on Stokastic, locked the two pitchers, Jacob deGrom and Tatsuya Imai, and locked the Athletics stack: Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Tyler Soderstrom, Lawrence Butler, and one more value bat from the bottom of their order. That left roughly $3,300 per spot for a third baseman, a shortstop, and an outfielder, which is tight, but a 12-game slate has more than enough value to fill it. Clicking complete-this-lineup let the Sims add the three most optimal plays from our projections, so we did not hand-pick the final spots. It even handed back a little extra correlation: the third baseman and shortstop it returned, Ryan McMahon and Jose Caballero, are both Yankees, with a value outfielder out of Pittsburgh rounding out the lineup.

Then we ran it. In a small-field setting, under a thousand entries, the lineup graded at a 39% sim ROI, a 39% cash rate, and a 0.9% chance to win. Good, not special. So we switched the simulator to large-field, cleared a value bat, and let it refill, because the optimal lineup shape changes with contest size.

Want the tool that built this? Stokastic Sims runs your slate through thousands of simulated tournaments, surfaces the leverage stacks, and builds the lineups around them so you are not guessing on a 12-game night. Take a free look, then use code PERFECT10 for 10% off any Stokastic Sims plan.

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The large-field run is where it clicked. Because the Athletics stack carries so little ownership, this build graded at a 95.5% sim ROI, a 34% cash rate, and a 0.4% chance to win as a contrarian tournament play. There is real downside baked in, and that is fine. To win a GPP you need a build the field does not have, and this is one.

GPP vs. Cash: Which Build Applies to You

One scope note before you copy anything. Every number above, the sim ROI, the low-ownership leverage on the Athletics, the chase for first place, is a tournament (GPP) read. The whole reason we take the contrarian stack and the boom-or-bust SP2 is to differentiate from the field and chase a ceiling.

Cash games are a different exercise. In double-ups and 50/50s you only need to beat about half the field, so you build for the highest floor straight from projections rather than from the simulated tournament pool. The ownership edge that makes the Athletics great in a GPP does not matter in cash, where the safest points win. Use the contest sims for tournaments, and a floor-first build for cash.

The Bottom Line

Big slates are won by process, not by guessing which superstar pays off. Pay up for deGrom's strikeout profile at home, get contrarian with Imai's matchup and value, build around the leverage stack in the Athletics, and let the Sims complete the lineup from projections. That read repeats, and it travels to the next 12-gamer too.

Stokastic Sims runs this whole process for you: it simulates the contest thousands of times, finds the leverage stacks, and builds the lineups so you do not have to guess. New users get a look at the tools, and code PERFECT10 takes 10% off any plan.

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