MLB Daily Fantasy Helper: Friday 7/14/17

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

Carlos Carrasco ($9,500 on FanDuel): Carlos Carrasco entered the All-Star break on an absolute tear. After a brief injury scare in early June, his past six starts have produced a 3.02 SIERA with a 31.7% strikeout rate and 6.2% walk rate, and he has hit double-digit strikeouts in two of his past four games. That sweetness will be facing an Oakland Athletics lineup that now has a 24.4% strikeout rate against righties, a mark that continues to inflate as their youth movement progresses. They do make hard contact, but Carrasco's hard-hit rate against is just 30.3%. He's the guy we want to target in both cash games and tournaments.