3 Daily Fantasy Baseball Players to Avoid on 4/5/18
Matt Carpenter, 3B, St. Louis Cardinals
FanDuel Price: $3,300
This one is all about platoon splits. Matt Carpenter has been an excellent hitter for several years now, but like most left-handed batters, he struggles with southpaws. He's still above average against them because he's that good of an all-around hitter, but his wRC+ does drop from 139 to 112 and his hard-hit rate drops from 38.3% to 31.7% when he faces a left-handed pitcher compared to a right-handed pitcher.
Still, these are relatively average platoon splits. The real problem is that he's not facing some hum-ho lefty -- he'll be seeing Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Robbie Ray. In his breakout campaign last year, left-handed batters might as well not even come up to plate against Ray as he struck out a whopping 39.8% of the lefties he faced last season (with a measly 4.9% walk rate in the split).
As this price, Carpenter simply isn't worth the investment in this matchup.