FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball Helper: Thursday 4/12/18

If you thought we had slim pickings at pitcher on Wednesday, then don't get your hopes up for tonight's five-game slate. Really, unless you're strictly thinking from a game-theory perspective in tournaments, it will be hard to move off our top choice for the evening. And even then, the truth is it may make more sense to go contrarian on the hitting side when you consider the lackluster pitching choices.

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

Jose Berrios ($9,000 on FanDuel): Jose Berrios isn't perfect, but on this slate, he's the closest we come to that. A popular breakout candidate this year, Berrios posted a respectable, but unspectacular, 4.29 SIERA, 22.6% strikeout rate, and 7.8% walk rate in 2017. Those numbers won't blow your socks off, but they're in line with the other "top" arms on the slate (Gio Gonzalez and Sonny Gray). Berrios has put up promising numbers through two starts in 2018, showing a 2.80 SIERA, 25.5% strikeout rate, and 2.0% walk rate. Now, that's more like it! Of course, his early success comes with some red flags, such as an 8.7% swinging-strike rate and .222 BABIP, so we can't fully trust him yet. Still, that's better than what we can say for most of the alternatives, and he gets a good matchup against the Chicago White Sox, who struck out at a high rate to right-handers last year and have a modest 3.72 implied team total. Even if you're skeptical, Berrios will almost certainly garner heavy ownership in cash games, so it may be wise to just jump in the same boat as everyone else rather than risk trying to get cute.