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MLB Daily Fantasy Helper: Wednesday 6/22/16

Cole Hamels has had a strange season thus far, but a decent matchup against the Cincinnati Reds could help return things to normalcy.

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

Cole Hamels ($9,900 on FanDuel): To say that this has been a weird year for Cole Hamels would be a massive understatement. He has a superb 12.7% swinging-strike rate, and his ground-ball rate is the highest it has been since 2011, but he can't stop allowing dingers. Part of that, you'd assume, is rough luck as his 28.8% hard-hit rate is very respectable, so we can instead be encouraged by the strikeout upside and weak contact. Outside of dingers, the other thing that has hurt him has been an elevated walk rate, but the Cincinnati Reds have only gotten ball four in 6.7% of their plate appearances against lefties. Hamels' abilities to generate strikeouts against batters on both sides of the dish helps negate the Adam Duvall-effect, so he does seem worthy of being the most expensive pitcher on this slate.

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