The MLB Yahoo Cup Hot Corner: Round 11

Welcome to the MLB Yahoo Cup Hot Corner! This free-to-enter, single-entry contest consists of 27 rounds where the top 1,075 overall entries and the top 70 entries per round share $10,000, with $1,000 to first and $50 to first per round. Scoring will be cumulative across all rounds, with your seven lowest scores dropped at the end. You may join this multi-round MLB DFS contest at any point, but enter today to give yourself the best chance to take home the title. Click here to begin the chase!

Let’s focus on three players — one pitcher, one infielder and one outfielder — to be our MLB DFS picks for tonight’s MLB Yahoo Cup contest.

MLB DFS Pitcher: Zack Wheeler — $53

The two top pitching options on tonight’s slate face off against one another as Wheeler and the Phillies host Max Scherzer and the Nationals. While their $50-plus salaries might be difficult to get up to on other slates, it is actually pretty simple today with 15 games in play to extract value from. And considering how similarly they profile in this matchup, let’s side with the under-represented option in Wheeler as the priority spend-up.

According to Awesemo’s Top Pitchers tool, Wheeler finishes as a top-two pitcher on the slate 20.4% of the time. However, he has only being rostered at a 16.4% clip this evening, giving him a strong leverage score. And considering the likes of Scherzer and Blake Snell are each expected to appear in 40% of lineups tonight, getting different by siding with Wheeler makes a ton of sense. He utilizes a five-pitch mix to the tune of a 31.7% strikeout rate on the year, so despite the tough matchup against a Nationals team striking out at only a 22.8% rate in 2021, Wheeler’s arm talent can still win the day. Gamers can’t go wrong by starting lineups with either pitcher in this game, but take the path less rostered with Wheeler.

MLB DFS Infielder: Matt Olson — $23

Whether or not to play Olson tonight is more a question of what the strategy is with MLB Yahoo Cup lineups. If wanting to get different in hopes of passing a bunch of the field, avoid rostering the hard-hitting lefty versus a righty in Coors Field and hope it’s a bust. But if trying to build the highest expected value lineup possible, there is no way the Athletics first baseman is not the first batter in tonight.

On the season, Olson is in the 90th percentile or better in nearly every hitting statistic imaginable, including xSLG (.556), xwOBA (.393) and average exit velocity (93 mph). Already sporting 14 homers and 37 RBIs on the season, he now gets a date versus Rockies righty Jon Gray. Gray used to have some decent strikeout stuff in years past, but that has disappeared the past two seasons with a 19.5% strikeout rate in 2021 and a horrendous 12.6% strikeout rate in 2020. That does not bode well for Gray in this spot, as Olson is much improved with plate discipline this year, currently striking out only 16.7% of the time compared to the 31.4% of the time he got rung up in 2020. So don’t think too hard about it; simply click Olson into lineups and move on.

MLB DFS Outfielder: Jarred Kelenic — $7

This pick goes a bit off the board to round out plays for tonight. With either Scherzer or Wheeler plus Olson in the lineup already, finding a solid source of savings with a cheap stack will be extremely important. With the help of Awesemo’s Top Stacks Tool, there are certainly a number of places to turn to.

The one that looks the most enticing has to be the Mariners, who are being completely ignored by the public. As good as Shohei Ohtani has been at racking up strikeouts this season, there is no question he has a walk problem. With a 16.9% walk rate that puts him bottom 4% in all of baseball, stacking up Mariners and hoping he continues to be wild makes sense. Plus, he does give up a lot of hard contact, evidenced by a 44% hard-hit percentage on the season.

That makes it intriguing to target recent call-up Jarred Kelenic — who has had a rough go of it to start off his two-week MLB career — as a minimum-salary piece to include in the stack. Although Kelenic has failed to meet the expectations of being the Mariners’ No. 1 prospect so far, the sample of 84 Major League plate appearances is hardly enough to show anything at this point. And at every level before getting to the show, Kelenic displayed pure raw power that could show up sooner rather than later. That makes Kelenic an unexpected source of value tonight and worthy of a dart throw on Yahoo rosters.

Eric Lindquist hails from Sioux Falls, South Dakota (yes, that’s the one with Mount Rushmore). A steady diet of three SportsCenters a day at an early age led to his obsession with sports, one that 30 years later is paying dividends for him as a successful DFS player and sports bettor. Despite over half a million dollars in net career earnings, he’s most passionate about helping others achieve their financial goals, an energy you can witness on the daily in his current role as a host and analyst at Stokastic. He’s a former Division I golfer at Iowa State, wishes he was a former Minnesota sports fan, and is a proud father to a 100-pound Bernese Mountain dog named Duke that wishes he could just eat people food instead of the crap he and his wife feed him on the daily.

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