Boy, what a fitting title for this series. It's been stormy indeed. My struggling studs improved by about nine points from their Monday performance, but still came up well short of a cashing total at 77.5 points. It wasn't the exact same lineup as Monday as a couple of biggest strugglers had Monday off so I had to use some of the alternates. Of course those alternates both went yard Tuesday (Aramis Ramirez & Starling Marte). I almost stuck with Ramirez because he was one the very worst options with a -1 wRC+ over the last two weeks, but the absolute worst - Pablo Sandoval at -14 - plays the same position so I'm sticking with Panda the rest of the week after his off-day on Monday (unless Boston benches him).

The big disappointment for me was Molina dropping an 0-4 in Coors against a lefty (albeit a solid one in Jorge de la Rosa). Molina has been really down this year. I'm starting to wonder what his health status really is right now. I can't use him today because he is on the afternoon slate and there were only four games so I passed. Howard's zero against Anthony DeSclafani and his lefty issues was a bummer, too. Although maybe I should've listened more to Eno Sarris, my colleague and podcast partner at Fangraphs, as he quite likes DeSclafani and particularly his changeup so the .945 OPS v. lefties that he had through eight starts may have been misleading.

DeSclafani has been crushing lefties in his last four starts with a .431 OPS-against and now his full-season .732 OPS against lefties doesn't stand out as something you must leverage in DFS. Of course, I picked Howard because of his recent downturn, not because of a would-be prime matchup, but an ancillary benefit of this exercise caused me to look deeper into DeSclafani's recent work v. lefties as it is a split I had been attacking prior to Tuesday.

I certainly wish Kluber would've given me more, too, but honestly I just needed more offense to really compete yesterday given Heston's no-no, Votto's triple dong, and Stanton's double dong. There was at least one lineup I know of that had all three of those guys (and it happened to be Alan Harrison of The Fantasy Fix, a friend & colleague):

My lineup in that photo is the bizzaro Storm team, which I'm calling the Wave team since I'm riding the wave of the hottest players going. As you can see, it did much better than the Stormy team and pretty well overall, too. Having a 54-point pitcher will do that for you! The Wave team finished with 138.75 points for those curious as the snapshot above was obviously taken with games still in progress.

Anyway, let's get into Wednesday's lineups. We'll start with the Stormy team, of course.

A couple changes up top thanks to the day slate and an off-day. Molina is already playing as I mentioned and David Ortiz is getting a much-needed day off. Howard played in the afternoon, too, so I have to go off the board for a first baseman and I'm taking Alvarez who has a 56 wRC+ in the last two weeks through Tuesday. Yes, I got my initial pool looking at the last two weeks through Sunday, but I don't think drastically alters the integrity of the experiment by getting a replacement 1B using a slightly different two-week period.

As we've seen on Monday and Tuesday, the lowered prices of these sputtering studs leaves plenty of cash for pitching so I just went with two of the three best in Harvey and Ross. Jake Arrieta is in between them at $9,800. Let's hope that at the very worst, the Stormy team improves upon Tuesday's score.

There is an interesting development with the Wave team today, too. Day games prevented some of the biggest studs from being on it (Donaldson, Bautista, and Tulo to name a few) so it ended up relatively cheap and afforded me the chance to roster some pretty top end pitching, too, so I'll be very interested to see how this team fares.

I set my lineups a little earlier today because I have softball on Wednesdays, but if anyone is out of the lineup and requires changing, I'll note the changes here ASAP.