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.
Kansas City Royals
One of these days, Jose Berrios is going to put everything together, and he's going to become an impressive pitcher. That's still a work in progress for now, and it gives opposing offenses a good amount of upside.
The clear, overlying bugaboo for Berrios is his frightening walk rate. Over his past five starts in the big leagues, Berrios' zone percentage hasn't been higher than 39.2%, and he's not generating enough swings and misses to make up for that. This puts batters on base, giving your stack more plate appearances for DFS, and it means they can put big totals on the board in a hurry if they connect on just one swing.
One guy who has figured some things out throughout the season is Whit Merrifield. He has 85 plate appearances since returning to the big leagues, and he's rocking a 37.7% hard-hit rate, 8.2% soft-hit rate, and 40.0% fly-ball rate, the numbers of a guy with a solid ceiling for DFS. It hasn't resulted in any dingers yet, but those will come if he keeps lofting the ball, especially against a guy like Berrios, who has shown extreme reverse splits thus far.