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.
Chicago Cubs
More often than not, you'll want to avoid heavy exposure to places like Petco Park because their park factor isn't overly friendly to offense. On a full slate, we might be able to avoid the Chicago Cubs and their park-factor dip, but the matchup with Edwin Jackson can appease our minds when there are relatively limited options.
Jackson moved into the rotation with the San Diego Padres at the All-Star break, giving us a six-game sample from which to draw conclusions. His SIERA is 5.32 with a 14.4% strikeout rate and 10.0% walk rate, and those are scary numbers to put up against the team that is sixth in the league in wRC+ against right-handed pitchers.
Because Jackson's splits are relatively even against batters on both sides of the dish, we can take a second to gush over Addison Russell's in-season improvements. He got off to a bit of a slow start, but in 178 plate appearances since the start of July, he seems to have found a whole new gear.
Time Frame | Hard-Hit Rate | Fly-Ball Rate | Strikeout Rate |
---|---|---|---|
April Through June | 27.7% | 31.0% | 25.8% |
July and August | 35.7% | 42.1% | 19.7% |
We should take notice whenever a hitter makes improvements in any of those categories. But when they have extreme shifts in all three? That's a recipe for destruction, and Russell flashed his new-found sauciness over the weekend.
.@Addison_Russell – 465 feet! The 2 longest @Cubs HR of 2016 have been hit in the past 2 days at Coors. #Statcast pic.twitter.com/lzPjXe16VX
— #Statcast (@statcast) August 21, 2016