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: Yuli Gurriel ($3,800) – Marco Gonzales gave up three home runs in his first start of the season but has settled in over his next three to only allow one. Home runs last year were also an issue for Gonzales as he allowed 29 in 25 starts. Most of the homers allowed recently have come to right-handed hitters as last year they slugged 23 of the 29 and righties slugged over .500 on the year. This year it has been much of the same, plus some, as righties have all four homers on the year and a slugging of .638 against Gonzales. Gurriel is still searching for his first home run of the year, but in the words of great calls everywhere – “he’s due”.
Zach: Carlos Correa ($4,600) – Tyler Wells has pitched 70 total innings in the majors. In those innings, he has allowed 12 home runs with eight of those home runs coming at home against right-handed pitching. That works out to be an HR/9 of 3.27 in those situations. That is enough of a reason on its own for me to pick Correa in this article but the fact that Correa is starting to heat up is what really puts him over the top for me tonight. Correa has four straight multi-hit games and has an average exit velocity of 97.4 miles per hour in those games.
Jared: Yordan Alvarez ($5,100) – With 4 HR allowed on the season (2.6 HR/9) and a general track record of struggling to keep the ball in the yard, the Houston offense is a really good group to have exposure to this evening. Some may shy away from Alvarez as the LvL matchup on paper is a bit nontraditional, but when you unpack the numbers, there’s nothing to be scared about. For his career, Alvarez has a 148 wRC+ vs LHP compared to 158 against RHP. The ISO of .270 and .919 OPS are nothing to scoff at in the split vs LHP, too. Alvarez hits off speed at an elite clip, specifically change ups, where Gonzales makes his living. Add all that up and we have ourselves a superb situation for a hot-hitting LHB today that is simply worth the price of admission.
Overall Standings
| James | 11.5 (10 total home runs) |
| Zach | 10 (5 total home runs) |
| Jared | 11 (5 total home runs) |
