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: Rafael Devers ($4,500) – No real knock on Jose Berrios as a pitcher overall, but so far in 2022 Berrios holds a pretty gross split against left-handed hitters and that is lefties are hitting .500 against him and slugging .889. While this sample for this year is small, lefties have always hit Berrios at a higher rate and have 13 more homers than righties off of him in almost equal at-bats. Devers also does a good job at putting bat to ball and not striking out, and while Berrios averages a strikeout per inning, he has also allowed 17 hits in just 11 innings. I’ll play the current split edge here on a lefty power bat in Devers.
Zach: Cody Bellinger ($3,200) – After a down year last year Bellinger is back to being an elite hitter. Bellinger already has four home runs this season including two yesterday. Bellinger also is slugging .582 with an ISO of .309. those numbers alone make it hard to ignore Bellinger but when you add in the fact that he has slugged .857 with two home runs in 15 plate appearances against Merill Kelly in his career I don’t see how you don’t believe that Bellinger has as good of a shot as any one to go deep on this slate.
Jared: Hunter Renfroe ($3,400) – Last year, Renfroe went deep 31 times in just 572 plate appearances, with a .242 ISO and .352 xwOBA. He started 2022 fairly slow, but has really started to dial things up of late with a .400 ISO and .429 wOBA in his last 22 PA (6 games) including 2 long balls. Sam Long, tonight’s opponent, has a career .343 wOBA vs RHBs (5.57 xFIP) striking out just 7.2 per 9 in the split and holds a HR/9 191% higher vs RHBs than LHBs. He’s a solid but unspectacular pitcher, while Renfroe has light tower power and is in a great split. Let’s hope he keeps things going in the right direction for me tonight, making good on his elite power potential and recent form.
Overall Standings
| James | 10.5 (9 total home runs) |
| Zach | 8 (4 total home runs) |
| Jared | 10 (4 total home run) |
