MLB Daily Fantasy Helper: Friday 7/28/17

The beauty of daily fantasy baseball is that the top targets are different each and every day. Whether it's the right-handed catcher who destroys left-handed pitching or the mid-range hurler facing a depleted lineup, you're not going to find yourself using the same assets time after time.

While this breaks up the monotony, it can make it hard to decide which players are primed to succeed on a given day. We can help bridge that gap.

In addition to our custom optimal lineups, you can check out our batting and pitching heat maps, which show the pieces in the best spot to succeed on that slate. Put on the finishing touches with our games and lineups page to see who's hitting where and what the weather looks like, and you'll have yourself a snazzy looking team to put up some big point totals. We've also got our Solo Shot Podcast, which breaks down the MLB daily fantasy slate each day. Here's today's episode.

If you need help getting started on that trek, here are some of the top options on the board today.

Pitchers to Target

Danny Salazar ($8,200 on FanDuel): Danny Salazar's return to the rotation over the weekend was as saucy as you could possibly imagine. He threw seven shutout innings, allowing just one hit and no walks while striking out eight batters. Even more impressively, his swinging-strike rate was 17.4%. Dude was electric, and it has to change the way we view him. Salazar has been dominant when healthy in the past, and it seems like he's there now, making his season-long numbers largely irrelevant. He's facing the Chicago White Sox today, a team that has traded Todd Frazier and lost Avisail Garcia to injury within the past two weeks, dropping their active roster to 29th in wRC+ against righties. Salazar's always risky, but we need to buy him hard based on what he did in his first start back, and this matchup is the perfect opportunity to do so.