Every day this season, our team shares who we believe has the best chance to leave the yard. From one-off plays to core parts of daily stacks, we hope this fun article will help you build winning lineups along the way.
Welcome back MLB DFS grinders to a brand new season! As always, FantasyCruncher will have several daily articles from pitching to stacking, to home run picks, to general cheat sheets to help you build your daily lineups. And the best news, it is all free! This year for 2022, we are changing up the scoring for the home run calls to be weighted based on the player’s salary. If one of our writers chooses a player with a salary over $5,000 it will be worth 0.5 points. Between $4-$4.9k is 1 point, $3-$3.9k is 2 points, and anyone $2.9k or below is worth 3 points. In terms of salary, we are going off of DraftKings salary for this article. Again, the scoring system is just a fun and friendly competition between our MLB content writers.
Today’s Picks
James: Nolan Arenado ($5,200) – Bryse Wilson toes the rubber for the Pirates today and his 2021 with Pittsburgh wasn’t too great after being traded there from Atlanta. In all, Wilson made 16 starts, allowing 85 hits, 44 earned, and 15 home runs in just 74 innings. Both sides of the plate slugged over .500 against Wilson and lefties tagged him for nine of the 15 long balls. Wilson didn’t have a great spring either, having a 6.94 ERA over 11.2 innings. I really feel like I could go with any Cardinals bat here and land on one, though I will go with Arenado as he has taken Wilson deep once already in just three career at-bats.
Zach: Eloy Jimenez ($4,400) – Tarik Skubal is going to be a great pitcher in this league future but in the present day he is a young pitcher who struggles against major league hitting. In his two seasons in the majors, Skubal has especially struggled to keep the ball in the park with an HR/9 rate of 2.11, an average launch angle allowed of 15.2 degrees, and an average exit velocity of 90.3 miles-per-hour. Skubal has especially struggled against right-handed hitters allowing them to slug .515 with an HR/9 rate of 2.7. While I think multiple White Sox players go deep today Jimenez is my pick as he has been crushing the ball to start the season with an average exit velocity of 102.5 miles-per-hour and an 87.5% hard-hit rate.
Jared: Lourdes Gurriel Jr ($3,800) – Gurriel and the Jays should be a popular group to stack here on the slate, and for the HR column I’m attacking with who I feel is the best value of the group. Spencer Howard gives up plenty of hard contact and struggled mightily last year with a near 5.0 BB/9 mark, being more of a nibbler that is surely going to be in tough against a talented Blue Jays lineup. Last year he hit 16 of his 21 long flies against RHP, with a 113 wRC+ in the split and an ISO 25 points higher than vs LHP (.197). Really nice value here for a guy who is likely going to get plenty of pitches to hit following Vladdy, Bo and Teoscar in the order.
Overall Standings
| James | 1 |
| Zach | 0 |
| Jared | 0 |
