FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball Helper: Sunday 4/17/22
Our daily helper is available every day to analyze FanDuel's main slate and help give you a starting point when you're building lineups. Be sure to also incorporate our great tools into your research process. Whether you're looking for daily projections, the latest starting lineups and weather, or batting and pitching heat maps to find the best matchups -- we've got you covered!
Let's check out the top options on today's main slate.
Pitchers
Zack Wheeler ($10,200) - Philadelphia's ace struggled in his first start, producing a 7.7% swinging strike rate and a 5.23 expected Fielding Independent Pitching (xFIP) rating in 4.2 innings.
Wheeler will have a good opportunity to rebound on Sunday against a Miami Marlins team with a 25.5% strikeout rate and a 0.293 weighted on-base percentage (wOBA) against right-handers including six projected starters with K-rates over 23.6%.
The 31-year old stands as numberFire's top rated pitcher with a 39.1 FanDuel point projection and 7.1 expected strikeouts.
Alek Manoah ($10,000) - Despite shaky control in his first start, Manoah produced a solid outing with a 3.91 expected Fielding Independent Pitching rating and a 13.5% swinging strike percentage on 89 total pitches.
In a favorable opportunity to sustain his success, the 24-year old right-hander should be able to rack up strikeouts against an Oakland's lineup with a 30.5% strikeout rate and a lowly 66.7% contact percentage.
numberFire's models currently rank Manoah as the second best value play among his position with a 3.5 rating, 6.4 expected strikeouts, and a 35.0 FanDuel projection.
Nestor Cortes ($8,400) - New York's entertaining lefty performed well against a dangerous Toronto lineup last week, recording a 8.3% swinging strike rate and a 2.40 expected FIP.
Cortes will face off against a Baltimore Orioles' team with 66% of their lineup with strikeout percentages above 26% and overall poor 69.6% contact rate.
Stacks
Today's most popular stack will likely include a matchup between the Toronto Blue Jays and Adam Oller.
In his major league debut, the 27-year old journeyman had a horrid outing with a 7.45 expected FIP and a 83.3% hard hit rate.
Today's lineup offers big names with ideal form and value salaries including Bo Bichette (9.7% barrel rate, .288 expected batting average), Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (23.1% barrel rate, .347 expected average), Lourdes Gurriel (.269 expected average, $3,200) and Zack Collins (.356 expected wOBA, 25% barrel rate).
In an underrated matchup against Humberto Castellanos, the top offense in the National League could go under the radar despite a sneaky 4.8 implied total.
The Mets' lineup offers plenty of ways to take advantage of Castellano's trouble missing bats last season in six starts and his lowly 7.7% swinging strike rate.
New York's top of the order includes a recently hot Jeff McNeil (.295 expected average, .360 wOBA), Francisco Lindor (12% barrel rate, .426 wOBA), Pete Alonso (.301 expected average, 21.4% barrel rate) while the bottom half still offers some value with Travis Jankowski (.399 expected average, $2,500).
