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.
Cleveland Indians
The theme of today's slate is pitchers who keep the ball on the ground but lack the ability to bathe in strikeouts. Nobody embodies that profile more than Texas Rangers starter, Martin Perez.
No qualified pitcher in the entire league last year had a lower strikeout rate than Perez at 12.1%. Even Jered Weaver -- he of the 80-mile-per-hour heater -- topped Perez at 13.4%. And it's not as if Perez countered that by stifling walks, either; his 8.9% walk rate was above the league average. What he did do was hold opponents on the ground with a 53.2% ground-ball rate, but that can still lead to damage when you're allowing as many base runners as he does.
All of Perez's weaknesses are amplified against right-handed batters as his strikeout rate falls to 10.5% while he allows a 32.4% hard-hit rate. It just so happens that the Cleveland Indians picked up a new toy who hits from that side of the dish in the offseason.
Edwin Encarnacion with his first homerun in an #Indians uniform! How far will Cleveland go this year? #OpeningDay pic.twitter.com/tpVTDUCyfE
— LeadingMLB ™ (@LeadingMLB) April 4, 2017
The best news from that clip? The parrot followed Edwin Encarnacion across the border.
This is the first time this year we face a dilemma that will come to us often with Cleveland. Because Encarnacion and Carlos Santana are eligible at first base, we can't use both in the same stack. With a lefty on the bump, our decisions are a bit easier based on last year's batted-ball data.
Versus Lefties | Hard-Hit Rate | Fly-Ball Rate | Strikeout Rate |
---|---|---|---|
Edwin Encarnacion | 37.8% | 44.4% | 20.1% |
Carlos Santana | 29.2% | 31.8% | 10.2% |
If you can afford it, you're not passing up Encarnacion's hard-hit and fly-ball rates. Things won't be as easy when a righty's on the mound, but Encarnacion is more expensive for a reason on this slate.