3 MLB FanDuel Studs to Target on 4/4/19

Mike Trout, OF, Los Angeles Angels

Price: $5,000

There's no pitcher priced above even $8,500 on tonight's short three-game slate, and our top-projected arm will run you only $6,400, so we skip past the position in this piece and look right to the offensive studs on Thursday.

Not paying up on the mound leaves you plenty of salary space for the always-studly Mike Trout, who is deservedly priced as the slate's most expensive batter.

Trout and the Los Angeles Angels have a slate-high 4.58-run implied total against right-hander Edinson Volquez and the Texas Rangers. Volquez is 35 years old, hasn't posted a skill-interactive ERA (SIERA) better than 4.20 since 2010, and his two worst SIERAs since 2006 came in 2016 (4.72) and 2017 (5.19). He didn't pitch in the 2018 season.

Volquez's first start of 2019 was a rough one, getting only a 6.3% swinging-strike rate while hitting the strike zone on an ugly 36.3% of his pitches. The average velocity on his fastballs was also only 92.9 miles per hour, which is down from what we saw in his last two seasons.

Trout's fantasy upside doesn't need a ton of introduction, and he's coming off back-to-back seasons in which he notched a wOBA above .435 and an ISO greater than .315. He brings that into a superb matchup, and on a slate in which his $5,000 price tag is pretty manageable, Trout is easy to like tonight.