MLB Daily Fantasy Helper: Friday 6/17/16

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.

Pitchers to Target

Matt Shoemaker ($8,300 on FanDuel): One of these days, pricing will finally reflect how dominant Matt Shoemaker has been recently. That time is not today, meaning we get a discount one more time on this born-again ace. Shoemaker drastically changed his approach on May 16th, using his split finger with much more regularity than he had in the past, and teams simply haven't been able to hit it. He has an 18.0% swinging-strike rate since then with a 2.40 SIERA, 31.7% strikeout rate, and 1.8% walk rate. For some context, Clayton Kershaw's marks in those categories this year are 16.4%, 2.07, 34.4%, and 1.8%, respectively. Shoemaker isn't Kershaw, but he has been one of the best pitchers in the entire league over the last month, and we need to invest at this low price while we still can.