MLB DFS Strategy For June 25: How To Attack A Six-Game Slate Loaded With Cheap Strikeout Arms

Every so often a six-game slate quietly hands you a gift, and the Thursday, June 25 main slate is one of them. I counted nine starting pitchers with above-average strikeout stuff, and outside of two arms, none of them are even expensive. That changes how you build the whole thing, so let me walk you through where the value sits, which stacks the Sims keep spitting out, and the spots I am actually playing on DraftKings and FanDuel.

In Summary

• Slate shape: a six-game DraftKings and FanDuel main slate with nine arms carrying above-average strikeout rates, only two of them priced as premium.
• The anchor: Cam Schlittler ($10,500) against a Red Sox lineup that is dead last in the league against right-handed pitching.
• The value: Tatsuya Imai ($6,300) and Kevin Gausman ($8,500) are the two arms that let you spend everywhere else.
• The stacks: the Sims spread out, but Houston, the Yankees, and Philadelphia lead, with the Cubs against Freddie Peralta as a leverage angle.
• The lever: with this much cheap pitching, salary flows to the bats, so let the Sims rebalance your exposures instead of forcing chalk.

Watch The Video

This whole breakdown comes from Thursday's Stokastic MLB DFS Strategy show, where I run the Sims live and walk through every exposure. Watch on YouTube.

The Big Picture: Cheap Strikeout Stuff Everywhere

Before any individual play, understand the shape of the slate, because it dictates everything else. Pull up the Stokastic MLB Data Hub and sort the pitchers by strikeout rate, and the list is wild for a six-game board:

That is eight arms with above-average swing-and-miss, and only Schlittler and Sánchez are priced like aces. When the strikeout upside is that flat across the board but the salaries are not, the edge is in finding the cheap arms whose price has not caught up to their stuff, then funneling the savings into bats. That is the throughline for the entire build, and it is the kind of value-hunting that wins large-field tournaments.

Cam Schlittler Is The Cut-And-Dry Anchor

Start at the top. Cam Schlittler at $10,500 is the best pitcher on the slate, and it is not particularly close on matchup. Boston is dead last in wRC+ against right-handed pitching this season, 29th in wOBA, and 28th in ISO. They do not hit righties and they do not work counts, which is exactly the lineup you want behind a strikeout arm.

Schlittler supplies the strikeouts. He sits top-five among qualified pitchers in strikeout rate with the fifth-lowest walk rate, and he has been even sharper away from Yankee Stadium, posting a 26% K-minus-walk rate on the road. The market agrees: a 6.5-strikeout prop and a 17.5-out prop, both juiced to the over.

Here is the part that makes him the anchor instead of just a play. On the Data Hub he carries the highest projected fantasy points on the slate and the highest top-two-pitcher probability, yet he is $1,000 cheaper than Cristopher Sánchez ($11,500) at nearly identical ownership. Same ownership, better matchup, lower price. When you find that, you take it.

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Tatsuya Imai And Kevin Gausman: The Arms That Pay For The Bats

This is where the slate is won. Because the strikeout stuff is so deep and cheap, you do not need to spend up on a second arm, and the two I keep landing on are Tatsuya Imai and Kevin Gausman.

Tatsuya Imai ($6,300) against the Tigers is the value play of the slate, and nobody can argue he is anything but underpriced. He carries a 27% strikeout rate and a 5.5-strikeout prop at that salary, and Detroit owns the fourth-highest strikeout rate in the league against right-handed pitching, with four bats in the projected order carrying K rates north of 26% against righties. There is a real wrinkle: he has been better against righties than lefties and is likely to see roughly six left-handed bats. But since returning from the injured list he has not been bad at all. Strip out his first start back, and over his last six he carries a 3.45 xERA, a 3.43 xFIP, and a 28% strikeout rate. The week he was last on this show he turned that price into 11 strikeouts and 30 DraftKings points. You do not need a repeat of that on a six-game slate; you just need the floor a 27% strikeout arm gives you at $6,300.

Kevin Gausman ($8,500) is the middle-tier arm worth biting on. He has not been as sharp as Schlittler or Sánchez, but the matchup helps. The Rangers are middle-of-the-pack against right-handed pitching, 14th in wRC+ and 15th in wOBA, and have shown little power against righties this year. Gausman has been far better at home, and his strikeout prop tells the story: 6.5 on some books, 5.5 heavily juiced to the over on others. The honest caveat is that Gausman has a real floor problem. His last start was a meltdown, two innings, seven hits, four walks, seven earned, pulled before 70 pitches. He can go out and get blown up, and you have to accept that. But on a six-game slate where strikeout upside is the whole game, $8,500 for that prop is a number you take.

A quick contrast on how to think about these two tiers:

Sánchez is the name that trips people up. He is a Cy Young-caliber arm and basically matchup-proof, with one rough start in his last 11. But at $11,500 you are paying more than $1,000 over Schlittler in a worse matchup, and he is already the slate's highest-projected-ownership pitcher. When the Sims ran this morning, I was getting only 8% Sánchez and around 49% Schlittler. The tool is telling you the same thing the price tag is.

One More Value Arm: Freddie Peralta As A Cheap Pivot

DraftKings dropped Freddie Peralta to $7,500, and I understand the hesitation. This is not the Freddie Peralta of years past. His strikeout rate is down to 22%, more than seven points off his career average, and the Phillies just carved him up for hard contact in his last start. Something is off this year. But one bad start is one bad start, and we have rostered plenty of arms coming off a clunker who bounced back. The Cubs carry a 6.5-run team total, he is getting around 13% ownership, and at $7,500 on a six-game slate he is a perfectly viable pivot if you want to get off the more obvious arms. I would honestly rather get to him than MacKenzie Gore here, only because Toronto has such a low strikeout rate that Gore's matchup is a slog despite his 26% rate.

The Stacks: Spread Out, With Houston And The Yankees On Top

With the pitching this cheap, salary flows to the bats, and the Sims reflected it by spreading the stack exposures out instead of hammering one team. The leaders this morning:

• Houston (25%) against Troy Melton. Houston grades out as the number-one stack score on the slate, led by Jose Altuve, Jeremy Peña, and Yordan Alvarez. Even though they are the highest-owned stack, the Sims still have me at roughly two-and-a-half times the field on them, so the ownership is earned, not a trap.
• Yankees (22%) against Connelly Early. The Yankees carry only a 4.4 team total, which keeps the ownership reasonable, but the bats and the price are there.
• Philadelphia (17%) against Cade Cavalli, with the top of the order in Kyle Schwarber, Bryson Stott, and Alec Bohm.
• Arizona against Zac Gallen, a cheap, contact-heavy group fronted by Ketel Marte and Corbin Carroll. This is the contrarian angle if you want to get off the chalk; our MLB DFS contrarian and leverage guide covers when an under-owned stack is worth the gamble. Note the weather: the Diamondbacks-Cardinals game in St. Louis has rain potential all night, so keep an eye on it if you are stacking it.
• Toronto (13%) against MacKenzie Gore, with George Springer the bat to build around.

The point is not to force one stack. It is that on a board with this many priced-down arms, the Sims naturally diversify the bats, and you should let them. Get the leverage where it is real, which on this slate means staying overweight Houston even as the chalk.

How To Actually Build It

Here is the throughline if you only take one thing from the slate:

1. Anchor with Schlittler ($10,500) as your premium arm and let the matchup do the work.
2. Pair a cheap strikeout arm, Imai ($6,300) or Gausman ($8,500), to free up salary for bats.
3. Spread your stacks across Houston, the Yankees, and Philadelphia rather than forcing one team.
4. Let the Sims rebalance. On DraftKings you roster two pitchers, so you can stay chalky on individual arms while keeping them un-paired across your lineups, which spreads risk without sacrificing the best plays.

That last point is why this is a Sims slate, not a single-projection slate. When this many arms grade out close together, the edge is in how they combine across a portfolio of lineups, and that is exactly what the simulations solve for. New to terms like top-stack rate, value score, or K-minus-walk rate? Our MLB DFS glossary defines the metrics this read leans on.

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