Maikel Franco Daily Fantasy News, Rankings, Projections

The Royals continue to be chalky night in and night out, but the DFS sites seem reluctant to raise their prices. FanDuel has done a reasonable job with it, but you still have guys like Franco and O'Hearn sitting at punt level prices. Soler and Perez remain ridiculously cheap on DraftKings. Any way you slice it, you can stack up the middle of this order on any site without breaking the bank. That's going to have players interested, especially in a matchup against an aging Ivan Nova, who has seen his numbers tail off over the last several seasons. He had a 5.16 SIERA and 4.91 xFIP a year ago while allowing hard contact at a 33% clip. This simply isn't a good pitcher, making the Royals' value bats hard to ignore in this spot.

We have at least one more day of Royals chalk to deal with on DraftKings, and the prices remain dirt cheap for this decent offense against a bad Detroit pitching staff. At third base, there are a lot of strong options, so I wouldn't go all in here in tournaments, but for a starting point in cash games at least, there's just no way to overlook Maikel Franco at minimum salary. Franco is way too good a hitter to be this cheap especially against a team like Detroit and Ivan Nova.

There are elite high end pitching and obvious high upside bats all over this slate. In order to fit in any of the best plays, you're going to have to go cheap somewhere. There will be nothing sneaky about the Royals-Tigers game, but we can't overlook the salaries on players like Salvador Perez, Maikel Franco, Ryan McBroom, C.J. Cron and Jonathan Schoop. Matt Boyd is a good pitcher, and one that I'll be using in tournaments, but that's still no reason a quality major league player hitting cleanup should cost minimum salary on this slate.

Man, I am not going to lie - this is a bit of an awkward spot for me. I don't think that there is any doubt that Royals players are simply underpriced on DraftKings on this slate but I also really like Matthew Boyd as a contrarian option at SP for tournaments. The reality is, if you're building a "cash game" lineup for this slate, you're likely going to wind up with 2-3 Royals in your lineup simply due to how cheap they are. While I am not against just eating Royals chalk in cash games or 50/50's (fading a chalky Jorge Soler is big time scary), I think the correct approach is to go underweight on them in tournaments.

Steven Matz has had a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde season, with two eight strikeout games followed by a start where he didn't record a single out against this very same Phillies team. Matz has a strong 26% strikeout rate through four starts but is getting hit hard, with a 42.6 Hard%. Like his counterpart, Matz is also poor in regards to stolen base prevention which gives the Phillies some stolen base upside to pair with their power potential.