Stacking can be a controversial topic in many daily fantasy sports, but you can count baseball as a glaring exception. Here, it's universal.
Using multiple players on the same team on a given day presents you with the opportunity to double dip. If one of your players hits an RBI double, there's a good chance he drove in another one of your guys. When you get the points for both the run and the RBI, you'll be climbing the leaderboards fast.
Each day here on numberFire, we'll go through four offenses ripe for the stacking. They could have a great matchup, be in a great park, or just have a lot of quality sticks in the lineup, but these are the offenses primed for big days that you may want a piece of.
Premium members can use our new stacking feature to customize their stacks within their optimal lineups for the day, choosing the team you want to stack and how many players you want to include. You can also check out our hitting heat map, which provides an illustration of which offenses have the best combination of matchup and potency.
Now, let's get to the stacks. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Cincinnati Reds
If the loss of Jay Bruce has put the Cincinnati Reds' offense in the tank, it hasn't showed up yet. They're still eighth in the league in wRC+ since the All-Star break, and their strikeout rate over that span is just 19.1%. That's likely enough to hop all over Jimmy Nelson's struggles.
Back on June 26th, Nelson walked five batters in a five-inning start against the Washington Nationals while only striking out one. He hasn't had fewer than two walks in any start since, racking up a 5.19 SIERA with a 15.8% strikeout rate and 12.3% walk rate. Even though he has generally pitched better at home this year, that split isn't enough to overcome the concerns around his current form.
The Reds had Adam Duvall essentially come out of nowhere and shock the world this year with his mad pop. Getting one such performance is pretty dope, but they might have Duvall's protégé holding down the six hole now.
You can hurt 'em, Scott Schebler, but you ain't gotta kill 'em.
Like Duvall, Schebler strikes out a ton, but as you saw, he can straight yoke when he makes contact. Over 139 big-league plate appearances, he has a 37.2% hard-hit rate, complimenting the .311/.370/.564 slash he posted in 319 Triple-A plate appearances this year. This hasn't shown through in his results in the Majors yet, but as long as the Reds keep giving him a chance, things should come around soon enough.