FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball Helper: Friday 5/3/19

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.

If you need help getting started on that trek, here are some of the top options on the board today. We'll be focusing exclusively on the main slate.

Pitchers to Target

High-Priced Pitchers

James Paxton ($10,300 on FanDuel): This is a really fun pitching slate. I mean, we're not even going to talk about Chris Sale or Tyler Glasnow -- that's how many good arms are available to us. Paxton has been excellent this season, carrying a 2.82 SIERA, 36.2% strikeout rate and 14.8% swinging-strike rate -- all of which are career-best numbers -- into tonight's home matchup with the Minnesota Twins. The Twins boast the best wOBA (.346) in baseball with the fourth-lowest strikeout rate (19.8%), making this is a tough matchup in a homer-happy park. But Minnesota's strikeout rate jumps to 24.4% against lefties, so there's some upside here for Paxton, and the matchup could scare away some people, adding to his GPP appeal. Our models are high on Paxton despite the matchup, projecting him for 41.2 FanDuel points, though with him listed as just the seventh-biggest favorite (-154), there are better cash-game plays out there.