MLB DFS Picks Today (8/3): Rays Smash Spot At Coors

Michael Lorenzen — one of the featured players on today's slate.

The Quick Answer

Monday's seven-game main slate is thin on pitching but has one matchup that clears every bar: Tampa Bay Rays (6.7 implied total) against Michael Lorenzen (COL) at Coors Field, where seven projected Rays lefties line up against a pitcher allowing a .586 slugging percentage at home. Beyond that smash spot, the real strikeout arms are Cam Schlittler (NYY, $11,500) and Brandon Sproat (MIL, $8,000), with a $6,000 discount forming on Cal Quantrill (TEX) now that San Francisco has traded away its toughest out. The full pitcher board, stack rankings and the show's own exposure numbers are below.

Watch The Video

The full breakdown of today's seven-game slate, built live off the Stokastic MLB Data Hub run, including the pitcher K-rate sweep and a live five-uniques stress test on the Tampa stack. Watch on YouTube.

Pitching Is Thin On This Seven-Game Slate

Of the 14 starters on the board, the show's Data Hub run counted just three with a real season strikeout edge. Everyone else clusters in a tight band, which is exactly why one hitting matchup is doing more work than usual today.

Wrigley Field carries no wind and a 75-degree afternoon, so treat that matchup as neutral. Everywhere else, the story is the same: totals bunched in the 4-to-5 range, with Coors Field the clear outlier above it.

The Smash Spot: Tampa Bay's Lefties Vs. Michael Lorenzen (COL)

This is the one matchup on the board that isn't close. Michael Lorenzen (COL) is allowing 1.6 home runs per nine at home this year, with a 16% strikeout rate, a 10% walk rate, a 2.05 WHIP, a .390 BABIP against, a .425 wOBA allowed and a .586 slugging percentage allowed, and a .242 ISO at home. Against lefties specifically, he's been worse: a .431 wOBA and a .266 ISO allowed. The Rays are projected to run seven left-handed bats into that lineup tonight, in a park that plays as the best pure hitter's environment in the league. It's the kind of alignment the show doesn't hedge on: a contact-heavy Rays offense that strikes out at just a 19% clip, facing a pitcher who doesn't miss bats, at altitude.

The correlation angle doubles here, too: Tampa's own starter in this game is Ian Seymour (TB), who carries a 28% strikeout rate on the season and a 32% rate specifically as a starter, since his early-season work came mostly out of the bullpen. Rostering the Rays stack and Seymour together plays both sides of the same expected blowout.

The Data Hub numbers back the eye test. Tampa's stack carries a 25.5% top-stack probability, more than double Colorado's 9% and far ahead of every other team on the slate. It's also the highest stack score on the board, and even after forcing five unique players per lineup in a live test, Tampa still held 41% stack exposure. The field isn't fading this spot, and neither is the show. Yandy Díaz (TB) and Junior Caminero (TB) are the priciest pieces, with Taylor Walls (TB), Cedric Mullins (TB) and Chandler Simpson (TB) as the cheaper complements getting used underneath them. On value alone, Tampa actually ranks third on the slate behind Toronto and San Francisco, which says more about how expensive the roster is getting than about the matchup being anything less than elite.

Worked Example: Cal Quantrill (TEX) Post-Trade Discount

Cal Quantrill (TEX, $6,000) is the second-cheapest pitcher on the board, and the number got more interesting an hour before the show went live, when San Francisco traded Luis Urías (SF) to Philadelphia at the deadline. Arias carried a 2.8% strikeout rate across 324 plate appearances against right-handed pitching this season — an outrageously low mark that had been dragging the Giants' team strikeout rate down. With him gone, the order Quantrill actually faces looks different. Willy Adames (SF) and Heliot Ramos (SF) both carry 27% strikeout rates, presumed leadoff man Bryce Eldridge (SF) is also at 27%, and cleanup hitter Rafael Devers (SF) sits at 25%. Not the whole lineup is a swing-and-miss risk: Drew Cavanaugh (SF) is down at 22%, and both Drew Gilbert (SF) and Jung Hoo Lee (SF) run well below the team average. But the chunk of the order that does chase is exactly what makes a 16%-strikeout-rate arm like Quantrill worth including in the player pool at this price, even though he isn't walking into anyone's top-three pitcher list today.

The Board's Real Swing-and-Miss Arms

Everyone below that line (Justin Wrobleski (LAD) at 19%, Logan Webb (SF) at 19%, Michael McGreevy (STL), Michael Lorenzen (COL), Brandon Pfaadt (ARI) and Cal Quantrill (TEX) all around 16%, and Shane Bieber (TOR) rounding out near the same mark) sits at or below the league-average strikeout rate. That's half the board. Sproat, Seymour and Schlittler were the show's actual top three, chosen specifically because they're the only starters with a real strikeout edge on a slate this shallow.

Public field ownership projections had Schlittler at 32%, Sproat at 25%, Chandler at 22% (a number that surprised the show given the matchup), King at 17% and Wrobleski at 16%. The show's own build landed close on most of those (28% Schlittler, heavy on Sproat, close to the field on King and on Pfaadt), with Chandler again coming in higher than the matchup seemed to justify at $6,600.

Exposure Check Before You Lock

By stack score, the Data Hub run ranks the slate Tampa Bay, Toronto, Colorado, San Francisco, San Diego, Houston, then New York Yankees seventh. The Yankees' own top-stack probability sits at just 5.6% despite a 4.6 implied total. By value percentage, the order flips some: Toronto grades best, San Francisco (the Quantrill matchup) second, with Tampa third. The show's own stack exposure, with no uniques forced, ran Tampa Bay 41%, Toronto second, San Francisco 9%, the Yankees 7% and Colorado 6%, with smaller shares to Texas and Houston.

One flag before you build: Michael King (SD) was scratched from a start earlier this week with no announced explanation. He's still scheduled to pitch today, but confirm he's actually in the pitching slot before lock. Our late-swap guide covers how to stay flexible if a scratch hits close to first pitch. The MLB trade deadline lands at 3:00 PM ET today, so treat every projection here as subject to a same-day update if a lineup regular gets moved.

The Bottom Line

Pitching is thin today, and the show built its whole plan around that fact: lean into the one elite matchup instead of forcing quality where it doesn't exist. That means Tampa Bay's bats and Ian Seymour in the same game at Coors Field, Schlittler and Sproat as the two clean strikeout plays elsewhere on the board, and Quantrill as a cheap pivot now that the Arias trade has thinned San Francisco's contact hitters. Check Michael King's status and any deadline-day lineup changes before you lock, and catch the show's Live Before Lock update at 6:00 PM ET for anything that moves late. Run today's full board, MLB DFS projections, ownership and stacks in the DataHub, before you build, and brush up on stack correlation if you're deciding how hard to lean into Coors.

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Every number above came off the same MLB Data Hub run pulled up live on today's show. Use code MLBSTRATEGY for 10% off any Stokastic DFS or Props package, weekly, monthly or all-access.

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For today's full pitcher board and stack ranks, head to the MLB DFS picks hub, or brush up with the Stokastic Sims tutorial, our contrarian and multi-entry strategy guides, or the MLB DFS glossary and how to win at MLB DFS primer if you're new to slate construction.

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