Home Run Derby: Monday, August 12th
Calling home runs, besides great fun, often makes the difference between a wildly profitable night in DFS and missing the cash line. Throughout the 2019 MLB season, I will endeavor to find a few home runs in three salary tiers on DraftKings. Join me throughout the year and call your home runs for monthly and seasonal RotoGrinders prizes. Without further ado, let’s play Home Run Derby!
Throughout this season, I will produce the Home Run Derby for main slates on DraftKings 2-3 days per week — selecting a home run from three different pricing tiers. If you want to call your home runs, please use these tiers for your selections to be eligible for any Derby prizes. Here are the tiers.
Luxury Box – $4,500 and above
Club Seats – $3,500 – $4400
Bleachers – Below $3,500
Hitters must be selected from the DraftKings Main Slate.
Schedule this Week: Monday, Tuesday, Friday
Happy Monday, Grinders! We have a few more weeks of home runs to predicts before shifting our focus to the NFL. Tonight brings eight baseball games for the hunt with a few solid offensive contexts to attack. Coors Field is on the slate and will feature two terrible pitchers. Yankee Stadium is back and welcomes the… wait for it… Baltimore Orioles. The Blue Jays and Rangers will duke it out in Toronto fresh off the city’s Summerslam extravaganza. Let’s get to it. Here are my picks for tonight followed by a leaderboard update from Friday.
The statistics for each player are for the 2019 season.
Luxury Box
Trevor Story — SS – $5,600
Story in 2019 – .276 ISO, 44.1 FB%, 45.5 Hard%, 91.1 MPH aEV
Kelly vs RHH – .217 ISO, 89.3 MPH aEV, 39.6 FB%, 40.7 Hard%
I am not sure what I am supposed to say for this tier. We have a Coors Field game with two jabronis pitching. I anticipate many people will load up on picks from this game for their top tier. Normally, I would prefer to swerve. Not tonight.
Kelly is bad and is starting to show his warts. Merrill yielded six home runs over his past three starts — two of which he gave up seven earned runs apiece. The Rockies offense is a much different offense at home. Tonight, there will be runs… many runs.
Trevor Story is having a reasonably powerful season. He has been a high ISO player throughout his short career in Coors Field and has 26 home runs thus far in 2019. Look for a couple more over the next few days.
Club Seats
Aaron Judge – OF – $4,400
Judge in 2019 – .201 ISO, 29.5 FB%, 54.7 Hard%, 96.6 MPH aEV
Blach vs RHH – .400 ISO, 90.4 MPH aEV, 41.2 FB%, 64.7 Hard%
Well, this feels pretty familiar. On Friday, I took Judge because his price was just too low. Today, his price went up a smidge but the statistics I cite got a bit worse. Also, he did not hit a home run last week — knocking me out of the RotoGrinders Home Run Derby. As the writer of an article with the same name, I am disgusted with myself. Thanks a lot, Aaron.
Today, Aaron can totally redeem himself. Why? The Yankees play the Orioles in a doubleheader today. I will obviously need to monitor lineups but Judge should see a big helping of opportunities against the worst pitching staff in baseball. After the Yankees hit like 533 home runs against the Orioles early last week, the Astros proceeded to score 23 runs against them on Saturday. This staff is so bad. Disregard Blach’s number for this year because the sample is too small. Yet, the numbers don’t matter. Blach is back by a band of glorified batting practice arms.
Do not let me down, Aaron.
Bleachers
Justin Smoak – 1B – $3,400
Smoak in 2019 – .191 ISO, 42.3 FB%, 42.7 Hard%, 90.1 MPH aEV
Jurado vs LHH – .159 ISO, 88.6 MPH aEV, 36.6 FB%, 45.5 Hard%
Justin Smoak received just enough of a price discount to drop him into the bottom tier. The man looks like a true slugger when standing next to the lightweights we are accustomed to sifting through at these prices. Smoak is a far more powerful hitter against righties — his ISO jumps to .243 and his average exit velocity jumps to 91.3 MPH.
Ariel Jurado is not very good and struggles to miss bats. A hitter with Smoak’s penchant to whiff is benefited by a pitcher who will struggle to strike him out. While the context would be far better in Arlington, the Canadian environment is no slouch for power hitters. Backed by a generous bullpen, Smoak should see a fair share of chances to go yard.
Leaderboard (sortable by column)
| Player | Total | August | 8/2 | 8/5 | 8/6 | 8/9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| joeycis | 32 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| erichanlon | 24 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| shanekern03 | 47 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| nrcave | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| mewhitenoise | 9 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| boomanfoo | 33 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
| allanturner84 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| hautalak | 25 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| TheDataDetective | 20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| infy72 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| ropediddy | 26 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| bcorbett | 41 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| pastorthor | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| MoccasinMusic | 27 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Gillik9486 | 36 | 4 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Anttheman | 18 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Curse | 24 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| WestCrook1 | 42 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| oxlodge42 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| strgzer585 | 37 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| weave40 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| pryan000 | 36 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| HIPPYHD | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| apov22 | 32 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| whitetrashballerz | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| jsherman003 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| wcuball29 | 13 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| dhorton8813 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| yisman | 33 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| SmoothLH20 | 16 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| DJESQUIRE | 32 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| bigstacks2015 | 12 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Wencesace21 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| BigPod | 11 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| GBRollClones | 17 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 |
| tmirrione | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| sochoice | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| firemedicpat | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| pabloplyr | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| dmurphhh | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Despite a slate which brought 46 home runs to our doorstep, the contest entries struggled to pick out the correct hitters. Gillik9486 found two home runs to boost his August total to four. BigPod and DJESQUIRE added to their totals to set the top mark at six home runs for the month. BigPod was closer to the top than reported on Friday. His home run, combined with the correction, deadlocks him and DJESQUIRE for the top spot.
Though the slate size is not extremely large, eight games could be just enough for some fireworks when you consider a few of the aforementioned contexts. Will we be on the right players? Will Coors Field explode with home runs tonight? Will Aaron Judge finally hit a freakin’ home run? Excuse the saltiness and enjoy your slate. I will be back tomorrow with an update and a few more picks. Until then, good luck, everyone.
I am happy to announce that at the end of each month I will be rewarding the highest home run total with a RotoGrinders T-shirt. Having a rough month? Don’t let up. The RotoGrinders member with the most home runs throughout the season — until the end of August — will be awarded a 3-month Combo Premium subscription to start the NFL season!
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the article, stick around for the rest of the MLB season. Want to compete against me? Drop your expensive, mid-tier, and cheap home run calls in the comments (DraftKings pricing). Otherwise, give me a follow on Twitter where I typically post slate-relevant statistics and embarrassing comments about professional wrestling.
Statistics for this article are obtained from FanGraphs, Baseball Reference, RotoGrinders Daily Research Console, and Baseball Savant.