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.
New York Mets
We haven't had many reasons to dabble in the New York Mets recently with the laundry list of injuries they've run into on offense. They're starting to get better, though, ranking fourth in hard-hit rate over the past 30 days, and they run into Mat Latos in his return to the rotation. That'll move the needle.
In Latos' 11 starts with the Chicago White Sox, he finished with a 5.57 SIERA, 12.1% strikeout rate, and 9.4% walk rate. Even though he was able to limit hard contact at a decent rate, the sheer volume of base runners at those ratios is overwhelming. Latos' strikeout rate in three Triple-A starts was just 14.1%, so this isn't a problem that has corrected in his time off, meaning the Mets are primed to keep trending up.
Jay Bruce's time with the Mets hasn't exactly been a rousing success. His .193/.267/.328 slash is partially validated by a 27.5% strikeout rate, justifying the occasional dips in the batting order he has seen. It seems as if things are turning around, though.
Jay Bruce cranked one of his own #Mets pic.twitter.com/2vCVgRPoUs
— Rob Lopez (@R0BaTO) September 5, 2016
Over the past 30 days, Bruce has jacked his hard-hit rate up to 39.3% with a 35.7% fly-ball rate, much more in line with what he was doing prior to the trade. Because this up-tick isn't quite showing itself in his results yet, now is the time to check Bruce out, especially in a matchup like this.