MLB Daily Fantasy Helper: Tuesday 5/9/17

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. We've also got our Solo Shot Podcast, which breaks down the MLB daily fantasy slate each day. Here's today's episode.

If you need help getting started on that trek, here are some of the top options on the board today.

Pitchers to Target

High-Priced Pitchers

Max Scherzer ($11,600 on FanDuel): Max Scherzer may not be as big of a lock as he usually is, but there's still plenty of reason to like him. Scherzer leads the slate in both SIERA and strikeout rate and 2.93 and 32.3%, respectively, and his 15.4% swinging-strike rate is the fourth-best mark in the league. If you don't want to pay the salary, you can certainly justify it because he's on the road in a hitter's park and facing a quality team that has a designated hitter. However, it's hard to match Scherzer's talent, and there are enough value hitters to make lineups work if he fits your process.