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 MLB DFS lineups along the way.
As always, FantasyCruncher has 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: Cody Bellinger ($4,500) – Merrill Kelly had a fantastic April posting an ERA in the 1.50 range. But May has not been as kind as he has a 6.53 ERA in the month – allowing 24 hits over 20.2 innings. Home runs have not been a huge issue for Kelly, but he is prone to them as he allowed 21 last year. What I am more focused on here is the high fly ball rate recently, as over the last two starts, Kelly has 16 fly ball outs to just 5 ground ball outs. He also has 9 walks over his last three starts. When location becomes an issue, the home run comes into play and with the high fly ball rate, Kelly is playing with fire. The Dodgers tagged Kelly for eight earned just 10-days ago and Bellinger has two career homers against Kelly in just 17 at-bats.
Zach: Julio Rodriguez ($4,300) – Rodriguez is smoking hot right now. Over his past 12 games, Rodriguez is slugging .667 with an ISO of .333. Rodriguez has five home runs in those games with three in his past four games. Those numbers are enough for me to pick Rodriguez in this article but the fact he also faces the most home run pitcher on this slate Jose Urquidy really pushes him over the edge for me. Urquidy leads this slate with an HR/9 rate of 1.56 and has allowed a home run in all but two starts this season.
Jared: Ty France ($4,000) – I debated between France and Eugenio Suarez, who are both hitting the ball pretty well right now for Seattle. Jose Urquidy has a slate-worst 11.9% barrel rate allowed over the last two weeks, with a 2.31 HR/9 in that time period as well. He’s a fairly balanced fly ball and ground ball pitcher, but recently has seen things skew a little higher on the hard hit side of things, with more coming via the air (50% hard hit rate which also is the worst on the board here today). Meanwhile, France is continuing his strong 2022 campaign, and over his last 27 PA has a .523 wOBA, 261 wRC+ and 60% hard hit rate to lead the Mariners in that time. Lots of home run upside in this lineup today, and I’m hoping things run through France in that regard.
Overall Standings
| James | 13.5 (11 total home runs) |
| Zach | 12 (8 total home runs) |
| Jared | 16.5 (10 total home runs) |
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