5 Daily Fantasy Baseball Value Plays for 4/19/19

Yuli Gurriel, 1B, Houston Astros

Price: $3,000

Even with a Coors Field game on the slate, no team comes close to offering an implied total as high as the Houston Astros' 5.60 tonight as they take on Drew Smyly and the Texas Rangers.

The left-handed Smyly has opened the season with a terrible 5.37 skill-interactive ERA. A three-game sample size isn't especially reliable for a stat like SIERA, but that's backed up by some egregious contact numbers (58.3% hard-hit rate, 8.3% soft-hit rate and 41.7% fly-ball rate), and an 8.2% swinging-strike rate that is on pace to be a career-low.

These struggles also happen to be coming over his first three games since returning from Tommy John surgery, leaving little room for optimism that he'll bounce back to the form we saw from him in 2016 (which wasn't all that impressive anyway, having posted a 4.16 SIERA over 30 games).

Yuli Gurriel has opened 2019 with a .356 wOBA and .185 ISO, both of which are topping his major league averages of a .331 wOBA and .159 ISO. Those career-average numbers rise slightly to a .336 wOBA and .166 ISO against southpaws, and that comes on a solid 35.6% hard-hit rate.

Those aren't huge numbers by any stretch, and typically they wouldn't be especially enticing at $3,000, but this matchup and the Astros' high implied total more than make up for that.