MLB Daily Fantasy Helper: Thursday 5/25/17

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. With the split slates, we'll be focusing exclusively on the main slate beginning at 7 pm Eastern.

Pitchers to Target

High-Priced Pitchers

Jacob deGrom ($11,000 on FanDuel): (UPDATE: deGrom has been scratched from tonight's start. Rafael Montero will start in his place.) With today's day game at Yankee Stadium postponed due to rain, we'll have to hope the conditions later on are more favorable for baseball. If they are, Jacob deGrom is the slate's clear ace. deGrom enters his start against the San Diego Padres with a 3.21 SIERA, 32.3% strikeout rate, and 15.2% swinging-strike rate, helping him rack up at least nine strikeouts in five separate starts this year. His main bugaboos have been walks and hard contact, and the Padres don't get a whole lot of either. They're 28th in hard-hit rate against righties, 23rd in walk rate, and have the second-highest strikeout rate. Good luck duplicating deGrom's combo of floor and ceiling. As long as the weather obliges, lock this guy in for the main slate.