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. With the split slates, we'll be focusing exclusively on the main slate beginning at 7 pm Eastern. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Texas Rangers
Remember all of the optimism about the Texas Rangers following their trade deadline moves? It hasn't quite panned out yet. They're 26th in wRC+ in the month of August, sitting behind such offensive juggernauts as the Atlanta Braves, Oakland Athletics, and Philadelphia Phillies. Is it time to jump ship?
Nah, fam.
Even though they don't have the designated hitter tonight, they're squaring off with Tim Adleman, who has the second-highest SIERA on the slate at 5.06. His walk rate (10.4%) is almost as high as his soft-hit rate (12.3%), and that's not a formula hyper-conducive to success. The Cincinnati Reds' bullpen has been dramatically better in the second half, ranking 14th in SIERA, but Adleman's struggles are enough to move the needle.
There is one caveat to this stack: you might want to steer free of Ian Desmond. He doesn't have an extra-base hit in August, he has a 25.0% strikeout rate to a 3.3% walk rate, and his 22.7% hard-hit rate is equal to his soft-hit rate. It's fine to invest in a player who's slumping if there are reasons to believe it's related to bad luck, but Desmond's peripherals are beyond concerning. Adrian Beltre is dope, and few batters rival the upside of Jonathan Lucroy, but you'd be wise to omit Desmond from a Rangers stack.