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.
Tampa Bay Rays
Once the Tampa Bay Rays shed a few assets at the trade deadline, you kind of assumed that their offense would slip from the stacking realm and exclusively become a target for opposing starting pitchers. That has been true against lefties -- as David Price showed last night -- but overall, they're still fifth in wRC+ in the second half, meaning we can look their way as they face Clay Buchholz.
Buchholz's last turn through the rotation wasn't terrible as he held the Detroit Tigers to just one run on six hits over six innings. Most importantly, he didn't walk a single batter. Still, his velocity was a bit down, he only had three strikeouts, and his swinging-strike rate was 7.4%. That's the Buchholz we grew used to seeing as a starter earlier in the year, and it doesn't seem like he has fully skirted those issues just yet.
Buchholz's big bugaboo this year has been facing left-handed batters, so giddy up, Brad Miller.
Brad hit two balls off the batter’s eye—his 7th multi-HR game. First traveled 446 feet, @Statcast says. #RaysUphttps://t.co/bbcclAKJtZ
— Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) August 17, 2016
Miller has a 39.6% hard-hit rate and 37.4% fly-ball rate since the All-Star break, so those 11 dongs in that time are no fluke. Kevin Kiermaier, Corey Dickerson, and Logan Morrison are all also options if they're in the lineup, but this puppy centers around Miller.