Pitcher	1B/C	2B	3B	SS	OF
Kenta Maeda	Anthony Rizzo	Kike Hernandez	Kris Bryant	Trea Turner	Eloy Jimenez
Lance McCullers	Vlad Jr	Marcus Semien	Josh Harrison	Xander Bogaerts	Adam Duvall
Charlie Morton	Joey Votto	Alcides Escobar	Patrick Wisdom	Paul DeJong	Tyler O’Neill
Robbie Ray	Ryan Zimmerman	Jose Altuve	Raffy Devers	Bo Bichette	Juan Soto

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Pitching

We have a massive 15 game slate on tap tonight, once again without any clear “aces” to jam in. If we scan projected ownership, we will see all of Kenta Maeda, Lance McCullers and Charlie Morton at the top of the projections. This makes sense, seeing as all three own a SIERA under 4.00 with 30% strikeout rates over the last 30 days. These guys have been locked in, and all three have exploitable match-ups against the Tigers, Mariners and Mets respectively. New York is clearly the best of those three teams offensively, which should leave Morton lower-owned than the expected chalk combo of Maeda/McCullers. I’m fine with those two in cash game builds, and you should probably be playing them there, but you can always get different in GPPs. One guy that stands out at lower-ownership is Robbie Ray. He has been the best real-life pitcher on this slate this season, and also owns the highest strikeout rate at 31%.

Another high-upside pivot is Dylan Cease. Cease has the second-best strikeout rate behind only Ray at 29.5%. I like his match-up vs the Kansas City Royals as well. Their current projected lineup owns just a .303 wOBA against right-handed pitching this season. This is a beatable match-up for a good pitcher, and he will be much lower owned than the “aces” of this slate despite higher strikeout upside.

Batters

We have a big three in terms of stacks for me tonight — starting with the Cubs, Nationals and Blue Jays. The Cubs face Vlad Gutierrez in the hot weather in Chicago, while the Nationals get Matt Moore and a terrible Phillies bullpen. Toronto rounds out the top three against Garrett Richards, someone we have stacked against with this exact team as recently as last week. I expect the Cubs to be the highest-owned stack due to the weather bump, and I like the one through six in all formats — Gutierrez is bad against both sides of the plate so we don’t need to pick out lefties or righties specifically.

Moore has been terrible vs right-handed batters this season allowing a .wOBA north of .400 in the split. We want to focus on the right-handed Nats bats, starting with Trea Turner, Ryan Zimmerman and Josh Harrison…but, don’t forget Juan Soto in full five man stacks.

If you are looking for a lower-owned wildcard stack, I’m looking at the Marlins. They have a positive park shift heading into Camden Yards, and while the sample is small, the results have been terrible for Spenser Watkins. Adam Duvall is one of my favorite plays on the slate, and you can build around him, Starling Marte and Jesus Aguilar in your stack.

 

 

Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)