Pitchers
Joe Musgrove- My preferred SP2 alongside Chris Sale becomes my SP1 with Sale’s game getting cancelled. Musgrove looks poised to take a big leap forward in 2019, piling up 25.0% strikeouts and under 29.0% hard hits to kick off his season. He won’t be as good as his ERA currently indicates, and he’s eventually going to allow a homerun, but I believe the strikeouts are real backed by a 13.3% swinging strike rate and his matchup is positive against the Diamondbacks tonight at home in Pittsburgh.
Yonny Chirinos- I expect Chirinos to be the highest-owned mid tier play tonight, especially since we know for a fact he will pitch, The matchup against the Royals is solid in terms of strikeout upside, and he also gets to pitch in one of the friendliest pitching environments on the slate at home in Tampa Bay. I was mildly interested in him before, but I find him hard to avoid in DK cash games now that Sale is off the slate. He’s in play on FanDuel as well for the savings, but his upside isn’t technically as high as you would like on a one pitcher site.
Chris Bassitt- I don’t feel great about this seeing that he is a sub-19.0% strikeout rate guy for his career, but Bassitt is someone who is able to limit hard contact extremely well and that may play tonight in his pitcher-friendly home park. He’s cheap enough that I’m willing to take a shot on him in an attempt to literally play any bats you want (talking FanDuel here), but I don’t love taking someone that may not even touch 20 in terms of fantasy points either. On this slate, with no clear ace, I think it’s more viable than usual and I may bite the bullet tonight and hope for offensive explosions.
Tournament Pool: Jack Flaherty (FD ONLY)
Building Blocks
Matt Carpenter- It appears Carpenter is mimicking his slow start from last season, one in which looked pretty slow but when digging in deeper was more unlucky than bad. He still owns over 43.0% hard hits and 50.0% fly balls for the 2019 season, so I’m going to roster him at this price for as long as I can before he’s back to the price he was at last season.
Joey Wendle- Wendle became pretty much the top value play for me today with the news he will be batting cleanup against Brad Keller. Keller isn’t as bad as everyone makes him out to be, but he’s a low strikeout pitcher which could lead him into trouble with how good the Rays offense has been early on this season. It’s more about the price for me though, and it allows you to pretty much fit in whoever you want on either site should you plug him in.
Stacks
1. Yankees- Outside of the Yankees severe injury problems, explain to me why we are going to get them at 5% owned tonight against Matt Harvey? The Yankees rank 24th in the MLB in strikeout rate against righties this season, yes the injuries have helped that, but for right now we can stop pretending that they are this massive K team. The problem here is we want lefties, and the Yankees don’t have many of them, but the righties they do have such as Gleyber Torres, Luke Voit and Clint Frazier are more than capable of getting the ball up in the air against Harvey. Mix those three in with Mike Tauchman, Mike Ford, DJ LeMahieu and we have my favorite stack of the night that I expect to come in extremely under-owned.
2. White Sox- The White Sox will definitely be higher-owned tonight in their matchup with David Hess. We know that Hess allows homers at an extremely high rate, almost 2 per 9 innings last season and 3 so far in 2019. The White Sox offense is not a great one, but they do have power which suits perfectly well for this matchup. I would start with one of Jose Abreu or Yonder Alonso, and fill in with guys such as Yoan Moncada, Tim Anderson and maybe even Ryan Cordell if he slots in the lineup in place of Eloy Jimenez who was placed on the bereavement list today.
Chalk Stacks: Nationals, Rockies, Astros
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
