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. As usual, we will not be discussing today's game at Coors Field here. You likely already know you want exposure to a game at Coors whenever you can get it, and you don't need us to tell you. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Boston Red Sox
If this were a slate without a game at Coors Field, we'd be avoiding the Boston Red Sox like the plague. Loading up on chalky bats in DFS is never a desirable option. However, because Boston's a high-priced offense and people paying up for bats may gravitate toward the Arizona Diamondbacks in the thin, Colorado air, the Red Sox may not carry the ownership they usually would against Phil Hughes. That has to get your attention.
There may not be a worse team in baseball for Hughes to face than the Red Sox. Among qualified pitchers, only one has a higher hard-hit rate than Hughes, and his fly-ball rate allowed ranks 10th. That's going up against an offense which ranks second in hard-hit rate against righties at a whopping 38.3%. There are going to be swimming pools of hard contact in this one, and it all comes without the burden of a high strikeout rate on either side. It's the pinnacle of stacking Gucciness.
Going back to the ownership discussion, this isn't to say that the Red Sox will be a sneaky play. Not by a long shot. It's more to say that they won't have the suffocating ownership they would usually have in a spot like this. The best strategy may be to identify which Coors players will be the most popular (Paul Goldschmidt, Brandon Drury, and Chris Owings all could be) and pivoting to the Red Sox player who aligns with that position. With reasonable pricing for Dustin Pedroia and all of Hanley Ramirez, Mitch Moreland, and Xander Bogaerts being cheaper than their Coors counterparts, you get a bit of salary relief, as well, along the way.