Fantasy baseball's Week 9 begins on Memorial Day, meaning a hefty slate of day games, seven in total, with the earliest beginning at 1:05 p.m. ET. Before you depart for the day's festivities, make sure to set your lineups!
There are a couple of schedule oddities present in Week 9: The first is that, due to the Kansas City Royals-St. Louis Cardinals week-opening series at Kauffman Stadium spanning only two games on Monday and Tuesday, the Royals and Cardinals have both Wednesday and Thursday off. Originally, this series was scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, but per the Kansas City Star, the Cardinals requested to play on Memorial Day, facilitating the change.
Additionally, the first of three scheduled doubleheaders -- excluding those created by the rescheduling of postponements -- takes place on Saturday, as the Boston Red Sox host the Tampa Bay Rays for a pair of games within their four-game weekend series. In the original 2023 schedule drafted last August, the Rays-Red Sox four-game series was intended to span from Friday through Monday, June 5, the latter now a common off day for both teams, but the decision was made during the offseason to move the June 5 game up by two days and create what will now be a split-admission doubleheader.
Friday is MLB's third annual Lou Gehrig Day, which honors the New York Yankees great and Hall of Famer's legacy as well as raising awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Gehrig's Yankees begin a three-game road series against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday -- a matchup between teams that have faced each other a record 11 times during the World Series, with the Yankees winning eight of those series (albeit none since 1978 and six of those coming while the Dodgers played in Brooklyn). It's entirely possible that the Dodgers will get their Opening Day starter, Julio Urias (hamstring), back from the injured list during that series.