5 Daily Fantasy Baseball Value Plays for 4/18/19

Mike Tauchman, OF, New York Yankees

Price: $2,500

We won't know for sure until the starting lineups are released, but it's looking like we might not have any sub-$3,000 plays available in the Coors Field matchup between the Colorado Rockies and Philadelphia Phillies tonight. That game has an 11-run over/under, and the teams boast the two highest implied totals on the slate.

Getting no value out of that one, we can look one spot down to the New York Yankees, whose 5.20-run implied total puts them in third, not far behind the Phillies or Rockies.

Always a threat for big offensive production, the Yankees benefit from a great matchup against Kansas City Royals right-hander Homer Bailey, who posted a 5.19 skill-interactive ERA (SIERA) in 2017 and a 4.82 in 2018.

He's showing some improved numbers in both SIERA and strikeout rate early this season, but that's over a three-game sample, and at 32 years old it's not likely we've seen him fully transform his game. He's also giving up a 42.9% hard-hit rate, which is on pace to be a career-high, while his 14.3% soft-hit rate is on pace to be his second-lowest mark. Again those are over a small sample, but they're not far from last year's marks (40.9% hard-hit, 15.6% soft-hit), and that's a good indication that he's still the exploitable fantasy matchup we've been taking advantage of over the last two years.

Mike Tauchman gets some value simply from being cheap and in the Yankees' lineup with the platoon advantage tonight. He hasn't shown us much at the major league level, turning in a .247 wOBA over 94 plate appearances. We're again dealing with a really small sample-size there, and w have to go to his Triple-A numbers to get a bigger set of data to work with.

He made 475 Triple-A plate appearances in 2017, followed by 471 in 2018. In those two years he posted a .399 wOBA and .224 ISO with a 15.4% strikeout rate followed by a .420 wOBA, .248 ISO and 14.9% strikeout rate. We can obviously expect his MLB production to fall well shy of the marks against that lower level of competition, but big production like that is a great sign for his offensive potential, meaning his ugly major league numbers could be due for a serious bounce-back.