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. These will focus exclusively on the main slate beginning at 7pm Eastern. If you are playing the early or all-day slates, Thursday's Solo Shot podcast included a brief discussion of stacking options available there.
Houston Astros
There is only one team on this slate you'd normally consider stacking if you had a full complement of options. That's the Houston Astros against Ariel Miranda, and even that presents a few reasons for mild concern.
On the whole last year, Miranda had abundantly concerning peripheral stats. His SIERA was 4.77, and in 10 appearances as a starter, he allowed a 35.9% hard-hit rate and 51.6% fly-ball rate. If that fly-ball rate were a single batter, it easily would have been the highest mark in the league, topping second-place Todd Frazier at just 48.7%. In our pursuit of dingers, he's a guiding light.
That said, Miranda seemed to figure something out over his final four starts of last season. He amped up his split-finger usage to 17.6%, and it pushed his strikeout rate up to 20.7% with a 3.7% walk rate. One of those stout starts came against these very same Astros. On another slate, that might give us pause, but a small offering combined with his batted-ball stats keeps the Astros right in our wheelhouse.
Against lefty James Paxton on Wednesday, the Astros rolled out a bunch of dudes who blast left-handed pitching into the sun. Here are the top six guys in that order along with their splits against lefties last year and prices and positions on FanDuel.
| Versus LHP in 2016 | Hard-Hit Rate | Fly-Ball Rate | Position | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| George Springer | 40.2% | 34.4% | OF | $3,900 |
| Alex Bregman | 37.2% | 38.1% | 3B | $3,200 |
| Jose Altuve | 37.2% | 32.1% | 2B | $3,900 |
| Carlos Correa | 40.7% | 27.4% | SS | $3,900 |
| Carlos Beltran | 41.8% | 41.0% | OF | $2,900 |
| Yulieski Gurriel | 38.5% | 46.2% | 3B | $2,500 |
Carlos Beltran may not be a young pup, but that dude can still ball.
Given the pitching options on the main slate, you're not going to need to scrounge for salary. With that in mind, it might be best to pick the pitcher you like most, find the Astros who stand out to you, and fill in the rest from there.