4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 5/17/17

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. With the split slates, we'll be focusing exclusively on the main slate beginning at 7 pm Eastern. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Chicago Cubs

We have to get this out of the way because it's going to be a topic of discussion for DFS today. The winds are blowing out to center at 21 miles per hour at Wrigley Field, meaning you'll want pieces of the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds on every cash-game roster you assemble. We'll focus on the Cubs here because they have the better matchup, but it's possible the Reds are actually the superior play for tournaments.

The Reds are throwing Scott Feldman, who hasn't been that bad this year. It's just not good enough where we need to avoid it in these hitter-friendly conditions. His SIERA is 4.63 with a 17.8% strikeout rate and 8.9% walk rate, that walk rate representing a big spike from his mark of 5.6% last year. Feldman has still done a decent job of suppressing hard contact, but that and his ground-ball rate have moved in the wrong direction from 2016. Feldman's not a bad pitcher by any means, and he's doing some things very well; it's just hard to see him shutting down a solid lineup in this type of situation.

When stacking the Cubs, we don't normally get the benefit of plucking value. That has changed recently. With both Ian Happ and Jeimer Candelario sticking with the big club for a bit, they've provided some decent pop at high-leverage spots in the order. They're just $2,300 and $2,400, respectively on FanDuel, though either or both could sit or be demoted to Triple-A prior to today's game. The easy way to be a bit contrarian in your Cubs stack is to hope that Miguel Montero gets the start at catcher.

Over the past calendar year, Montero has a 35.6% fly-ball rate against righties, and he has been crushing the ball in a small sample this year. He's $2,500 at catcher. Because he's not the team's top backstop, his ownership will inherently be lower than most of the other Cubs in the order. If we can somehow get him, Happ, and Candelario all in the lineup at once, this will be a cheap stack that also provides you with the ability to differentiate.