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 the 2022 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: Giancarlo Stanton ($4,900) – Aaron Civale is still a guy I view as a strong young pitcher, but he is also one who gives up a high flyball rate and has allowed 35 home runs over his last 35 starts. While the strikeouts have been there so far for Civale, he’s also given up eight runs through just 7.1 innings on the season. Civale has been a reverse splits kinda guy, allowing righties to hit around .40 higher than lefties and slug .100 points higher. Civale’s velocity isn’t too high and his whiff% remains low as well. I don’t need to over-explain Stanton’s raw power – he grades out atop the MLB for Exit Velo and Barrel%. I like how this matchup looks on paper and while in the total hunt for a ton of points against my fellow MLB writers here I hold a small lead, overall for calling shots in 2022 I have had a strong start.
Edit: No Stanton today so I’ll pivot this to Randall Grichuk.
Zach: Adam Duvall ($2,400) – I am on a bit of a hot streak with home runs on back-to-back days. I am going to test my luck today with Duvall. Duvall has yet to hit a home run this season and has an ugly slash line of .185/.254/.259 but still shows underlying numbers of being the hitter who hit 38 home runs last season. Just look at Duvall’s Statcast numbers as he is sporting an average exit velocity of 92.8 miles per hour and an average launch angle of 31.9 degrees. It truly is only a matter of time before Duvall gets a hold of one.
Jared: Joc Pederson ($3,300) – I’m starting to get a bit more confidence here after a slow start. In fact, I had written up Ozzie Albies yesterday before changing my mind prior to pressing “publish” and pivoted to Matt Olson. And, guess who went deep yesterday? Yep. Albies. In any case, that tells me my process is solid, so let’s stick with it. Pederson is a nice $3,300 candidate today facing Joan Adon, who has some appeal as a young arm without question, but remains a fastball/curveball pitcher giving up a ton of hard contact (16.7% barrel% in 2022) and a 5.12 xFIP as well. For a hitter with 93% of his career HRs vs RHP and a .254 ISO / .833 OPS in the split, it’s the right situation to get him today where he could absolutely leave the yard.
Overall Standings
| James | 8.5 (8 total home runs) |
| Zach | 8 (4 total home runs) |
| Jared | 6 (2 total home run) |
