Well, if you thought last night's main slate was small, we're dropping down to just three games on Thursday evening. It's a slate with few sure things both on the mound and at the plate, so you may want to skew your contests towards tournaments over cash games.
Our daily helper is available every day to analyze FanDuel's main slate and help give you a starting point when you're building lineups. Be sure to also incorporate our great tools into your research process. Whether you're looking for daily projections, the latest starting lineups and weather, or batting and pitching heat maps to find the best matchups -- we've got you covered! And don't forget to take a listen to The Solo Shot podcast with Jim Sannes, who breaks down the MLB daily fantasy slate each day.
On that note, let's highlight some of the top options for today's FanDuel main slate.
Pitchers to Target
High-Priced Pitchers
Yu Darvish ($8,400 on FanDuel): The night's most expensive pitcher -- but still cheap in the grand scheme of things -- Yu Darvish perfectly exemplifies the risky nature of tonight's slate. Darvish is easily the biggest name on the board and theoretically has the most upside, but he's coming off an injury-shortened 2018 campaign and was shelled in his opening start, allowing three earned runs in just 2 2/3 innings. Worse yet, he issued a whopping seven walks while showing a pitiful 5.3% swinging-strike rate and reduced velocity. Even amongst a modest group of starters tonight, the Braves hold the highest implied total against Darvish (4.64). And yet, he owns a career 29.5% strikeout rate and posted a 27% strikeout in each of the past two seasons, so if some version of the old Darvish emerges tonight, he could easily best tonight's other five hurlers. Based on that worrisome first start, he would be easy to gloss over on a larger slate, but considering the alternatives, you have to at least consider him in tournaments. On the flip side, if you think he'll crash and burn again -- or are making multiple lineups -- stack away with those Braves bats like Freddie Freeman ($4,400) and Ronald Acuna ($4,500).