FanDuel Daily Fantasy Baseball Helper: Thursday 5/16/19

As we often get on Thursdays, tonight's main slate is of the smaller variety, only bringing about five games and locking slightly earlier at 6:40 pm ET. Given the limited selection, there's a decent number of viable hitting spots, though only one hurler really stands out on the pitching side.

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

High-Priced Pitcher

Luis Castillo ($10,300 on FanDuel): Luis Castillo is the only hurler to crack the $10k mark, and it's frankly with good reason, as he's easily our best choice on the short slate. He leads tonight's eight starters in both strikeout rate (31.8%) and swinging-strike rate (15.7%) by a wide margin, while also besting them in SIERA (3.48) and ground-ball rate (59.3%). A 10.9% walk rate isn't ideal, but the overall package blows everyone else out of the water, and no one comes anywhere close to the same punchout upside. A date at Great American Ball Park with the Cubs wouldn't be one's first choice, though they aren't a bad matchup for those strikeouts, with an active roster fanning 23.1% of the time against righties. Castillo should be far and away the slate's highest-owned pitcher, but even in tournaments, this may be a case where you don't overthink it and just roll with the best guy.