Daily Fantasy Baseball News and Updates for FanDuel and DraftKings - 6/9/16

Welcome to the daily MLB updates and news article. We'll try and update it right up to line-up locks with as much information as comes across our desks. Let's get to it!

Last night's picks can be found here, so you can wrap your mind around what you need to be looking at before lineups lock today.

By the way - we keep our projection system updated with all of the batting lineup changes as they occur throughout the day right up until lineup lock. Every day. If you want access to that system so you can cut out a lot of the research element, click the button below!

What We Know

Holy cow. What a slate. In the history of DFS, there may have been worse days for pitching, but if so, we've chosen to forget them. There's nary an ace to be found and seven of the nine stadiums hosting games today ranked in the top 10 in home run park factors last season. Just hold your nose, pick a pitcher and stack up your offense, which should be plentiful today. Let's get to it.

Personnel

• Adrian Beltre is out today for the Rangers after leaving last night's game with a hamstring issue. The good news is that his absence frees up a spot for Jurickson Profar, who will play 3B at hit leadoff today.
• Starling Marte saw action as pinch hitter last night. He's been out of the lineup for the last two games nursing an ankle injury and he's considered day-to-day.
• Ketel Marte was back in the Mariners lineup last night and delivered two hits, two stolen bases and two runs scored. Neck spasms forced him to miss Tuesday's game after being activated from the DL earlier this week.
• David Freese missed his second straight game Wednesday due to a hand issue. His status for today's game is unknown as of this morning.

Tournament Stacks

St. Louis Cardinals
First off, we're skipping over the early games, but all four lineups are stackable. We prefer the Pirates, but everybody's expected to go off, so plug and play Rockies, Astros and Rangers at will. Tonight, it gets interesting. Not because there is any less expectation for offense—in fact, it's just the opposite. A dearth of reliable pitching means pretty much every offense on the slate is in play. We've chosen to write up the Cardinals, because they're the chalk play and we wanted to at least acknowledge that. As we've talked about all week, the Great American Ballpark provides a substantial boost to offense, and we're definitely not ducking Brandon Finnegan and his 5-plus xFIP, even if the Cards have been better against RHP this season. The bats are also affordable (especially on FanDuel), even if you choose to fade Jhonny Peralta. There's a lot to like in this lineup again tonight, and that's why they're the highest total on the board outside of Coors Field today.

Minnesota Twins
So, we gave you one chalk play, now we give you the Twins, who could be considered contrarian despite the fact that Vegas is calling for them to put up more than five runs against Tom Koehler tonight. What we like about Minnesota aside from the fact that they should be relatively low-owned is the upside. For a bad team, they've got decent pop, and they've been hitting well lately. They're third in the MLB in ISO over the last seven days and fourth over the last couple of weeks. Granted, hot streaks are notoriously unpredictable, but against Koehler, we think the odds are strong the Twins can keep the offense rolling. Koehler's stats have been trending downward over the last two-plus seasons, and he owns a 5.20 xFIP in 2016, thanks to his defiant refusal to throw strikes (5.4 BB/9). He's been especially awful away from home, a continuing a trend he's followed throughout the course of his career. He does a solid job of limiting the long ball, but with the exception of the red-hot Eduardo Nunez, most of the Twins batters we'd like to target are adept at working the count, which could equate to a short outing for Koehler tonight. The Marlins also have one of the worst bullpens in baseball (4.40 xFIP), which strengthens the case for Minnesota considerably.

Sneaky Pitcher

Ervin Santana

Geez, guys. I don't know. How do you choose an under-the-radar pitcher when there's no good option for chalk in the first place? I'm expecting the ownership rates to be even compared to most slates, so we're just going to go with the projection system's top pick on a points/dollar basis.  Santana isn't a guy we're excited to target—because he's not very good—but the same could be said for pretty much every other pitcher on the slate today. But Santana's favored to get the win, and he's one of the few guys not pitching in an extreme hitter's park, as Target Field is pretty close to neutral across the board in terms of park factors. He's also cheap, even on a slate without any high-priced pitching options, and the Marlins rank in the bottom half of the league in wRC+ and wOBA vs. righties. So there's that. I wish I could sell you on some upside, but to be perfectly honest, this is more of a dart throw in a dark room.

The "Every Lineup" Guys

Ryan Raburn

The projection system is really high on John Jaso today, but since we wrote him up in the picks column, we're giving you Raburn here. He's priced awfully cheap on both FanDuel and DraftKings for a guy in Coors Field with a history of crushing lefties. Raburn owns a career .226 ISO and .357 wOBA in the split, which would make him a strong play in all formats even if he weren't facing Jeff Locke in baseball's best hitting environment. Locke is coming of back-to-back nice outings and he pitched really well in his last appearance at Coors (6 IP, 8 Ks, 5 H, 0 R on April 25), but we tend to put more stock in the 4.17 career xFIP (north of 5 this year).

Bryce Harper

For your non-Coors play, we present Harper, who will have the good fortune of facing Miguel Gonzalez at US Cellular Field. The White Sox home park ranked sixth in the majors in home run factors last season and Gonzalez is a well-known meatballer. He gives up more than 1.3 homers/9 over his career and that number is closer to 1.6 vs. lefties over the last two seasons. As for Harper, you can disregard the batting average. He's still one of the game's elite hitters and the numbers should reflect that by season's end. He's putting up a .394 wOBA and .970 OPS against RHP this season, and he's in a great spot to pad those already-gaudy numbers tonight.

One other note: There are big differences between DraftKings and FanDuel pricing so the optimal lineups are looking quite different.

These are players that show up in each of the top 10 lineups as produced by our lineup optimizer. This doesn't necessarily mean that they're "safe," it just means that their projected weighted-mean point total is a solid building block for a great lineup foundation today.

Good luck out there today! If you want access to all of our numbers, get started with a free trial below of our lineup optimizer, on us!