3 Daily Fantasy Baseball Players to Avoid on 4/4/18

Nomar Mazara, OF, Texas Rangers

FanDuel Price: $2,500

Nomar Mazara is a rising young player in the league and, though he is still just 22 years old, he has acquitted himself quite admirably so far. But he does have a glaring weakness against southpaws.

Mazara's wRC+ is a solid 102 against right-handed pitchers, but it drops to a dreadful 58 against left-handed hurlers. As you might have guessed, this is, in large part, due to a high 23.8% strikeout rate against left-handers. And his 25.3% hard-hit rate and his 23.0% fly-ball rate (again, against lefties) don't do him any favors.

That is the opposite of an ideal combination against young Oakland Athletics pitcher Sean Manaea. Although Manaea has had his early peaks and valleys, the one thing he has been consistently good at is getting left-handers out. In his career, he holds left-handed batters to a .246 wOBA, while limiting them to a 26.0% fly-ball rate and a 25.5% hard-hit rate. Manaea was even better in his first start of the season, recording a 16.8% swinging-strike rate against all batters.

A batter that struggles to hit southpaws taking on a tough lefty-on-lefty pitcher? No, thank you.

Akash Bhatia is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Akash Bhatia also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username tenswimrun1. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his personal views, he may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his personal account. The views expressed in his articles are the author's alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.