FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball picks for Friday, May 27: two salary relief pitchers

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With some hitter friendly matchups on the board today, I am planning on using a salary relief pitcher to fit in some more expensive bats. The Giants face the Rockies in Coors in what will probably be a high scoring game, and Paul Goldschmidt faces a below average lefty at home in hitter friendly Chase Field, where he has a track record of destroying lefties in the last two years to an OPS over 1.000. I want to find a way to play a lot of these pricey players, so sacrifices have to be made elsewhere.

Two less expensive pitchers are under consideration. The first is Michael Fulmer ($7,400) vs the Oakland A's. The A's have a bottom third team wRC+ and ISO vs RHP of 89 and .138. They don't strike out much vs righties, but Fulmer has the electric stuff to miss bats and generate a good strikeout total. Fulmer has struggled in his intro to the big leagues, but has a 28% K%, better peripherals than his ERA shows, and is coming off a dominant 7 inning, 11 strikeout performance where he mixed in significantly more change ups into his pitch mix to go with his mid 90s fastball and hard slider. The critique on Fulmer has been that he's more of a reliever profile guy, but if he's throwing a good change up now consistently, that might make a big difference going forward to give him a good third pitch. Fulmer is still a risk, because he's only pitched more than 5 innings once in the big leagues, but there's some upside here, especially if he found something with his pitch mix in his last outing.

The second is Julio Urias ($6,900) vs the Mets. The Mets have struggled against lefties this year with a MLB leading 27.5% K% vs LHP and a mediocre 90 wRC+/.151 ISO. Urias is also a risk because he does not pitch deep into games often, either; the most he's thrown in a game in the minors this year is 6 innings, and the Dodgers likely won't push him. But he's one of the top pitching prospects in baseball and faces a Mets lineup that has had some injury problems lately with Lucas Duda and Travis d'Arnaud out. A line Urias could realistically put together is something like 6 innings, 6 strikeouts, 2 runs. He opposes Jacob deGrom, who is diminished this year with a fastball velocity that has dropped 2.5 mph and has not resembled his former ace self yet.

Both of these pitchers are risks, but that comes with the trade off of salary relief to fit some hitters in good run scoring environments into a lineup.