Weather to Watch
Cleveland at Cincinnati | Great American Ball Park | Overcast, 96F | Wind: 8 mph WSW
Ninety-six degrees with a crosswind angling toward the left field seats. Great American never needed help carrying the ball, and tonight the right-handed bats get an extra shove.
Atlanta at New York Mets | Citi Field | Mostly Clear, 79F | Wind: 11 mph SSE
Citi rarely earns a mention here, but tonight's crosswind does more for righty power than the temperature would suggest. It plays friendlier than its reputation without turning into a launch pad.
New York Yankees at Chicago White Sox | Rate Field | Clear, 99F | Wind: 17 mph WSW
Nearly triple digits on the South Side and a 17 mph gust working with right-handed pull power. This is the strongest hitting air on the board tonight, and both lineups have bats built to use it.
Chicago Cubs at St. Louis | Busch Stadium | Overcast, 102F | Wind: 10 mph WSW
The hottest reading of the day, 102 degrees with the wind straight out. Busch normally leans pitcher friendly, and air like this flips that on its head.
Houston at Los Angeles Angels | Angel Stadium | Clear, 79F | Wind: 8 mph SW
Mild evening in Anaheim with a light breeze out to center. A small nudge for hitters, nothing that changes how I build.
Boston at Athletics | Sutter Health Park | Clear, 90F | Wind: 12 mph SW
Ninety degrees, dry air, and a 12 mph wind pushing toward the fences in a park that already inflates offense. Sacramento belongs on the short list of best places to hit tonight.
Milwaukee at San Francisco | Oracle Park | Clear, 64F | Wind: 22 mph WNW
The oddball. Sixty-four degrees usually kills carry at Oracle, but a 22 mph wind blowing out picks the fly balls back up, and it helps the lefty swingers most. I lean slightly toward offense here without fully trusting it.
HR Calls
Willson Contreras (BOS) $5,500 vs Jack Perkins
Few bats in this price range produce right-handed power like Boston's cleanup hitter, who owns 15 homers off righties and a .394 wOBA in the split. Perkins misses plenty of bats, but the contact against him is loud: righties are slugging .492 with 1.8 HR/9, and a 58% strand rate tells you his innings unravel quickly once traffic starts. Sacramento at 90 degrees with a helping wind settles it for me. He is one of the priciest bats on the board tonight, and I am paying anyway.
Sal Stewart (CIN) $4,900 vs Slade Cecconi
Stewart keeps climbing the Cincinnati order, and the season line explains why: 15 homers against right-handed pitching with roughly a fifth of his fly balls clearing the wall in that split. Cecconi has been most hittable from that same side, allowing a .342 wOBA and 1.4 HR/9 to righties. Add 96-degree air in a park that rewards exactly this swing and I am sold. At $4,900 he is not a bargain, but this is the spot where I spend it.
Paul Goldschmidt (NYY) $3,700 vs Noah Schultz
DraftKings keeps pricing Goldschmidt like a fading veteran, and against left-handed pitching that is just wrong. He owns a .452 wOBA with nine homers in 127 plate appearances versus southpaws this year, as loud a platoon split as I can remember writing up. Schultz runs a 4.6 BB/9, and command that loose means he has to come into the zone late in counts, where righties have punished him at a 22% HR/FB clip. In 99-degree Rate Field air, $3,700 for this matchup is a gift.
Stacks to Target
1. Boston Red Sox vs Jack Perkins (R) | Implied Total: 5.78 | ROO Score: 6.4/10 | Cash
Boston carries the top implied total on the slate, and I get why. Perkins wears a 6.80 ERA that his strikeout stuff cannot rescue: a .324 BABIP, that 58% strand rate, and 1.59 HR/9 describe an arm that pitches into trouble and stays there. His softer side is right-handed contact, a .354 wOBA and .492 slugging allowed, which lines up with Contreras, Mead, and Rafaela in the heart of Boston's order. The Athletics bullpen behind him has leaked home runs all season, so the scoring window does not close when he exits. Sacramento heat and a wind blowing out push everything a step further. This will be a popular stack, and in cash I have no interest in being clever about it.
Core pieces: Willson Contreras $5,500 (R), Curtis Mead $5,000 (R), Wilyer Abreu $4,800 (L), Ceddanne Rafaela $4,200 (R), Masataka Yoshida $3,000 (L)
2. Chicago Cubs vs Matthew Liberatore (L) | Implied Total: 5.27 | ROO Score: 5.1/10 | Cash
Liberatore has not started a game in 16 days, and that reshapes the whole matchup. An arm sitting that long usually comes back on a strict count, which puts the St. Louis bullpen on the clock by the fourth inning. When he has pitched, righties tagged him for a .350 wOBA and 12 homers, and Chicago sends Suzuki (157 wRC+ versus lefties) and Carson Kelly (.423 wOBA in the split) straight at that weakness. The surprise is Crow-Armstrong, who has hit southpaws to a 148 wRC+ from the left side while lefties as a group have actually hurt Liberatore worse than righties have. In 102-degree Busch air, I want as much of this order as my salary allows. Chicago draws a crowd tonight and deserves every bit of it.
Core pieces: Pete Crow-Armstrong $6,300 (L), Seiya Suzuki $4,800 (R), Michael Busch $4,200 (L), Dansby Swanson $4,000 (R), Carson Kelly $3,400 (R)
3. St. Louis Cardinals vs David Peterson (L) | Implied Total: 4.73 | ROO Score: 4.4/10 | GPP
Same game, other dugout, a fraction of the attention. Peterson's 6.97 ERA oversells the disaster, but the profile underneath is still soft: a 13.6% strikeout rate against righties with nearly as many walks as strikeouts in that split, and St. Louis can run seven right-handed bats at him. Jordan Walker has mauled lefties to a 160 wRC+ with two-thirds of his contact hard, and Masyn Winn has been steady in the split as well. The one landmine is Burleson, who has no answer for left-handed pitching, so build through the righty core instead. Low-owned bats in the best run environment on the slate is exactly the tournament swing I look for.
Core pieces: Jordan Walker $5,800 (R), Ivan Herrera $4,200 (R), Masyn Winn $3,500 (R), Nelson Velazquez $3,000 (R), Jose Fermin $3,100 (R)
Pitchers
Payton Tolle (BOS) vs ATH | $8,800 | CASH
Tolle is my favorite arm tonight, and it is not close. A 3.33 ERA sitting right on top of a 3.58 xFIP means the results are earned, and a 26% strikeout rate against a 2.6 BB/9 gives him floor and ceiling at once. The Athletics carry a 3.72 implied total despite the friendly park, mostly because this lineup swings through so much. He will be popular and deserves to be. My cash builds start here.
Max Fried (NYY) vs CWS | $8,600 | CASH
There is a version of tonight where I talk myself out of Fried, because a 1.75% HR/FB rate is not a sustainable number and 99-degree Rate Field is exactly where numbers like that go to die. Here is the counter: he generates grounders at a 49% clip, Chicago's implied total sits at 3.69, and he has held both sides of the plate to a wOBA under .260. Some homer luck will leave him eventually. I doubt all of it leaves tonight, and the matchup carries most of the load anyway. He projects as the most rostered arm on the slate and I am not fighting it in cash.
Chase Burns (CIN) vs CLE | $11,300 | GPP
Now the awkward one. Burns has the best strikeout rate of any starter tonight and Cleveland's 3.42 implied total is the lowest of the night, so the surface says pay up and relax. I keep getting stuck on the shape of his season: an ERA under two and a half built on an 88% strand rate and a .265 BABIP, against a 3.39 xFIP. Some of that run prevention gets handed back, and at $11,300 you are paying for the version that keeps all of it. In tournaments, the strikeout ceiling still wins nights. In cash I would rather pocket the $2,500 and let the field carry his price tag.
Tatsuya Imai (HOU) vs LAA | $6,800 | GPP
The ERA says 5.59 and the strikeout rate says 27.5%, and I believe the strikeout rate. His xFIP runs more than a run below the surface number, so the results have lagged the stuff for a while now. The flaw is real: a 14% walk rate can bury an outing by the fourth inning, which keeps him off my cash rosters. Against an Angels lineup at a 4.16 implied total, the strikeout path at $6,800 is obvious. A tournament arm I will have plenty of.
Pitcher Regression to Watch
Zac Thornton (NYM), Negative Regression Candidate
Thornton carries a 1.95 ERA through his first 23 big league innings, and the market has treated it as real: $8,500, fourth highest on the slate. The inputs disagree. His xFIP is 4.61, opponents are hitting .210 on balls in play, he has stranded 81% of runners, and one of every six fly balls against him has already left the yard. In a sample that small, that combination is a warning. If the correction starts tonight, Atlanta's bats are the ones cashing in.
David Peterson (CHC), Positive Regression Candidate
Peterson's 6.97 ERA with the Cubs sits on a .355 BABIP and a 57% strand rate, both extreme enough that better outings arrive almost by default. His 5.21 xFIP says mediocre, and mediocre sits a long way from the 6.97 on the surface. That distinction matters tonight: I went after him with the St. Louis stack because the heat and the matchup are real, but anyone projecting a total meltdown is asking for more than the underlying numbers support.
Final Thoughts
Cash for me starts with Tolle, and Fried slots next to him if the bats get cheap enough. The hitting core is Boston, Contreras plus Mead or Rafaela against Perkins, with Yoshida at $3,000 as the glue that holds the salary together. A two-man Cubs piece of Suzuki and Kelly rounds out the build without paying for the full stack.
Two things have my attention before lock. Oracle's wind was gusting 22 mph at the afternoon reading, and if that holds, cheap Brewers bats get more interesting than the cold air implies. The other is how deep St. Louis lets Liberatore work in his first start in over two weeks; a hard cap on his pitches would shift even more of the Cubs' upside into the middle innings against the bullpen.
For tournaments, the Cubs and Cardinals game is the one to attack from both ends. A ten total in 102-degree air, a returning starter on one side and a below-average lefty on the other, is as good a run environment as this slate offers, and pairing a Cubs core with a Walker and Herrera bring-back separates you from rosters that stop at one team. Cincinnati righties against Cecconi are the second pivot, similar heat at Great American with less attention on them. And Burns over the chalk cash arms is the move I would save for a single big tournament entry.
Tools used for this slate
Every number in this playbook comes off the free BankrollSZN tools: today's MLB DFS projections, the MLB home run predictor, first-pitch weather for every game, today's starting pitchers, and the free MLB lineup optimizer.