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.
Los Angeles Angels
Monday's not a great slate for stacking with most of the pitchers residing in the awkward middle ground between being usable for DFS and guys we want to stack against. Mike Pelfrey is easily the biggest exception with both feet firmly planted in the Gucci zone for hitters, driving us in flocks toward the Los Angeles Angels.
Pelfrey's first four starts this year have been even worse than his outings last year with his SIERA shooting up to 5.99. A lot of that is thanks to his 7.1% strikeout rate compared to his 8.2% walk rate, all of which is validated by his 5.5% swinging-strike rate. Although Pelfrey is still holding hitters to a 30.0% hard-hit rate, those balls are now coming in the form of line drives and fly balls rather than grounders. The winds are blowing out at 10 miles per hour, and the Angels' implied team total ranks first on the slate at 4.80. There's nothing to dislike here, even with a mediocre offense.
If Albert Pujols is able to return from a personal issue that held him out of Sunday's lineup, this could be the closest we've seen the Angels to full strength all year. They did just lose Yunel Escobar to a hamstring issue, but that was after getting both Luis Valbuena and C.J. Cron back from other ailments. Both those guys have some pop, so it's possible the Angels are at their peak from a stacking perspective. Valbuena's the ideal target here given his propensity for punishing righties that has carried over into 2017.
#Angels anoche Luis Valbuena 🇻🇪 pego su 1er HR d la temporada #MGLD pic.twitter.com/u16r605LsR
— MeGustanLosDeportes (@GustanDeportes) May 9, 2017
He's $2,600 on FanDuel and will likely be hitting in the meat of the lineup, so use him to help pay up for the ever-delectable Mike Trout and others.