The daily grind: 7-30

The Daily Grind provides daily match-up advice based on my every morning waiver wire search. I welcome advice to help make this column more effective. Ownership rates are from Yahoo!

The Fanduel picks are a mixture of Daily League specific advice and information for the more typical fantasy owner.

Today’s grind

The Fanduel Daily League Players of the Day are:

Pitcher (to start) There are quite a few games for a Monday and even some nice options. Mike Leake couldn’t ask for a much better match-up than the Padres. Aside from a recent blow up against Arizona, he’s been very solid.

I’ll be leaning most heavily on Marco Estrada. He has been homer prone, but his ratios are elite and he’s set to spin his trade against the Astros.

Pitcher (bum): I expect Hisashi Iwakuma, Jeremy Hefner, and Ervin Santana to take a pretty thorough thumping today. They face the Blue Jays, Giants, and Rangers respectively.

Hitter (power): Keeping with the theme above, I’d lean on Travis Snider and Adam Lind to do some of that thumping.

Hitter (speed): David Murphy’s been a touch cool lately, but he’s still a five category contributor. Quintin Berry has a usable match-up against Clay Buchholz. Most of the usual suspects are “sits” today.

Tomorrow’s grind

I’m not a big Aaron Laffey fan, but he should be able to handle the Mariners offense at Safeco.

Kris Medlen has the Marlins and he’s one of the most criminally misused pitchers in baseball in my opinion. Which is not to say he’s amazing or anything, but he’s certainly a mid-rotation quality arm.

I’m tempted to put Carlos Gomez in the power category with all the long balls he’s hit recently. He’s got the platoon advantage tomorrow.

His peer, Rajai Davis, also have the platoon advantage.

Cliff Lee hasn’t been nearly as bad as his 1-6 record, but the 3.95 ERA doesn’t appear too off base. He lacks a put away pitch at the moment and his often pinpoint control has been off for most of the season. That said, I like Tyler Moore against him tomorrow.

Reliever watch

Alfredo Aceves blew the save yesterday but held on for a much deserved win. He pitched 2.1 innings.

Francisco Rodriguez and John Axford teamed up for an epic blown save. Axford really blew the save twice. With a four run lead in the eighth, K-Rod and Axford allowed the Nationals to tie the game. The Brewers then scored two more runs on the home half which Axford promptly surrendered in the ninth.