MLB DFS Picks: Stack Slants for DraftKings + FanDuel | August 8

Am I the only one that feels like the Tigers and Pirates are still scoring MLB DFS points in lineups I don’t have from last night? What a game that 17-13 extra innings affair turned into, total DFS bonanza for the few people who either game-stacked it or had enough of one team or the other. We poked at both teams a bit during the various strategy shows but I don’t think any of us liked it to go off like that, have to love the baseball gods sometimes.

Tonight’s eight game Main Slates should give us plenty of MLB DFS picks to choose from but I’m not sure we see something quite to that extent. What we do have on the board, however, are a few spots that look nice and juicy for us to pick off some high-upside low-owned plays here. I mentioned the Los Angeles Angels in last night’s Quick Hits column, their team ownership and stacks ranking would qualify them for a repeat mention below if I were here to take the easy way out, instead I’ll just mention that you should definitely get them into your lineups today.


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MLB DFS Stacks, Slants and Picks

Cincinnati Reds: 1-2-3-4-6 – Phil Ervin – Nicholas Castellanos – Joey VottoEugenio SuarezCurt Casali

The Reds were a team that came up numerous times through the day yesterday for looking good but ultimately slipped out the bottom end of my final crunches for all but a few of my lineups, which was unfortunate given the nice game these guys put up. I like the spot for them again today and they rank near the middle of the stacks tool with a success projection that is slightly outstripping their ownership. This one won’t be extremely sneaky but it will land us on a high-end offense that won’t be among the most popular, which is sometimes all we can ask. Taking a look at the percentages column we can see that the Reds could easily be ranked several spots higher based on the minimal difference in probability of success.

With lefty Brett Anderson on the hill we can start by looking at some of the Reds’ excellent right-handed power. That conversation begins nowhere but Eugenio Suarez. Over the last three seasons, Suarez has increased his ISO from .200 to .243 in 2018 and then to a ridiculous .301 in 2019. He did this mashing 49 home runs last season while posting a WRC+ 33% above league average. Suarez hit 11 home runs in just 156 plate appearances (7.1%) against lefties last season and posted the same .301 ISO against both hands. Nicholas Castellanos is the next right-handed bat that needs to be included in the Reds stack here. Now that we’ve named the two most popular players in this lineup, we need to find some ways to differentiate this thing. Phillip Ervin is not Ken Griffey Jr. out there but he’ll be cheap and leading off for this team. We currently have him pulling under three percent ownership on FanDuel and under six percent on DraftKings. I expect that to rise given the spot in the batting order, but keep an eye on it.

Given the chance to debate it with Reds Manager David Bell, I would dispute Ervin’s overall quality as an actual leadoff hitter, he strikes out more than I’d like to see, only walks about 7.5% of the time and has an extremely average career OBP of .323. I suspect that Bell is relying on the quality of Ervin’s split here, against left-handed pitching he’s shown far more patience, reducing strikeouts from 25% to 21%, bumping his walk rate and taking his OBP up to .357, which gives us a workable table-setter for some of the big RBI bats we want to roster. Now is also a good time to mention that we’re currently drawing nearly zero ownership on Joey Votto who is in the confirmed lineup hitting third. Votto had an ugly year against same-handed pitching in 2019, there’s no arguing it, but for his career this is a very high-end bat who has a WRC+ 37% above league average for the split. As recently as 2017, Votto had a .260 ISO and WRC+ of 154 against lefties. In 2019 Votto appears to have suffered from a shift in quality of contact that saw around 7% of his hard contact and 4% of his soft contact shift to medium contact, which resulted in numbers showing us sapped power and an inability to drive the ball in the aggregate. I’m not fully buying in that Votto is washed in the split yet. In his extremely small nine plate appearance sample against lefties so far in 2020, Votto has a 57% hard hit rate and one home run, which is an almost entirely meaningless glimmer of light way down at the end of a very long tunnel of data we don’t have yet.

With other bats like Matt Davidson and Curt Casali in playable spots in the lineup and with Jesse Winker getting the nod and unlikely to draw significant ownership in his lefty-lefty matchup, there are plenty of ways to get weird with Reds stacks today. Keep an eye on where they land a bit later in the top stacks rankings, the confirmed lineup may push people further off of them but I’m not sure it impacts their ranking to badly. I’m including Casali in the suggested stack as a hopefully offbeat catcher play on DraftKings, though I’m not sure we need to double up corner-catchers from the Reds on FanDuel and would cut the four-man stack before him on the blue site.


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Rockies – lineup dependent – Trevor StoryCharlie BlackmonNolan ArenadoMatt KempRyan McMahon

The Rockies got a mention in this space yesterday for their matchup against Yusei Kikuchi and basically everything we said about them there goes up two notches for the game against a significantly worse left-handed starter in Nick Margevicius. In his 62 major league innings, Margevicius has yielded an ugly 5.73 FIP while striking out just 16.7% of opposing hitters and yielding a 2.03 HR/9. Obviously this is an unfairly small sample size which was all accrued last year in a cup of coffee with the Padres. It might interest you to know that, in his only action above AA with that organization, Margevicius yielded a 5.16 FIP and 1.83 HR/9 while striking out only 18.3% of hitters? Double A hitters. I’m beginning to suspect this might be a bad pitcher.

The Rockies can just throw too much quality at this kid from both sides of the plate. We know about Nolan Arenado and Trevor Story, both will be popular in this lineup once again and are projecting for ownership in the high teens on FanDuel, through Story’s 17.7% is the only popularity mark over 10% on this team on DraftKings, where I like the play a little better. David Dahl sat last night but I suspect he’ll be back in the lineup here today. We can get to Dahl depending on the ownership and his place in the batting order. He’s not my favorite play against a lefty here but with his career .287/.323/.459 slash and WRC+ 10% below league average for the split, I’ll have some but I would prefer someone else in the leadoff spot for this lineup. I definitely want to work in some low-owned Matt Kemp. We touched on Kemp’s recent splits and his still intact power against left-handed pitching. He also shows more patience against lefties for his career, striking out less and getting on base more, though that has dissipated in recent years. It wouldn’t be entirely crazy to tell Kemp to look for more on-base and lead him off against lefties in this lineup, he has a better tool in that space than either Dahl or Hampson here. Regardless, Kemp should be a part of any Rockies stack unless he’s sitting.

As should Charlie Blackmon, who is currently drawing disrespectful ownership projections under five percent on both sites. I don’t care about the platoon as much with high-end bats unless there is an obvious provable trend in their numbers, I simply don’t see it with Blackmon. He does draw more of his quality against right-handed pitching, sure, but his career WRC+ 11% above league average to go with a .307/.359/.484 career slash in the split is nothing to skip over. The .359 on-base would actually put Blackmon in consideration for a leadoff role were I filing out this lineup card as well. Shifting him from third in the lineup to first and bumping Matt Kemp into the three-spot, where we want to place a lower-end contact hitter anyway (the preceding statement will set baseball purists hair on fire), is really making sense as I’m looking at this. That doesn’t help us for MLB DFS at all, however, we should be playing Blackmon wherever he lands in this lineup. If Ryan McMahon is in the Rockies lineup I’ll put him in mine. McMahon has shown demonstrably more quality against same-handed pitching to this point in his career, as we covered yesterday, but the public will be naturally shying away from the lefty-lefty matchup. Garret Hampson is someone who qualifies more as “fine” for me. He’ll be in some lineups but he’s not a feature piece. The speed is very real and if he gets on he can help your point total with a stolen base or two but the hit tool simply isn’t there yet and posting some zeroes for MLB DFS scores in the middle of this stack won’t help things.


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Author
Terry used to do other things, now he writes words on the internet. He hopes his more than 20 years’ experience in season-long and daily fantasy sports and his custom models for MLB, NBA, and NFL don't steer you too wrong when he writes columns and makes picks on Awesemo.com. A lifetime of experience keeping odd hours make Terry ideal to cover KBO baseball overnight until the world returns to normal. Most of those late night hours have been spent on the couch watching sports, T.V., and movies; just try to shut him up about any of the above. You can find his pop-culture ramblings and more on Sideaction.

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