MLB Daily Fantasy Helper: Thursday 8/18/16

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

Pitchers to Target

High-Priced Pitchers

Madison Bumgarner ($11,300 on FanDuel): It's Jose Fernandez night, so you know that if he's not rocking this top spot, somebody has to be in a sickly matchup. That's exactly what we have in Madison Bumgarner. In eight starts since the beginning of July, Bumgarner has a 12.0% swinging-strike rate, 28.5% strikeout rate, and 6.3% walk rate. Without Yoenis Cespedes, we can buy more into the New York Mets' 21.9% strikeout rate against lefties, enough to put Bumgarner over the top on a deep pitching slate.