5 Daily Fantasy Baseball Value Plays for 4/5/19
Eduardo Escobar, 3B, Arizona Diamondbacks
Price: $2,700
Tonight's warm-weather game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Boston Red Sox boasts a slate-high nine-run over/under. Projected to be a close one, both teams rank in the top-seven in implied total tonight.
The Sox will start right-hander Rick Porcello on the mound, and while he's no pushover, he also shouldn't deter you from playing Arizona bats. His 3.77 skill-interactive ERA (SIERA) last year did represent a significant improvement from the 4.28 he posted in 2017, but the 40.3% hard-hit rate and 42.3% fly-ball rate he allowed to left-handed hitters was still a major vulnerability and looked an awful lot like the 41.2% hard-hit and 45.6% fly-ball rates in that split in 2017.
The switch-hitting Eduardo Escobar will have the benefit of being a lefty against Porcello tonight, and he's coming off a solid 2018 campaign in which he converted a career-best 38.2% hard-hit rate and a 43.1% fly-ball rate into a .346 wOBA and .217 ISO. He also has a slightly higher ISO (.161 to .144) and ups his fly-ball rate (40.1% versus 37.3%) if we compared his work against righties and lefties over his career.
