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.
Tampa Bay Rays
There's a cool story tonight down in Texas as Austin Bibens-Dirkx makes the first start of his big-league career in his age-32 season. He was drafted back in 2006, and he's finally in the show. That's a guy who'd be fun to root for as a baseball fan. But from a DFS perspective, his first start comes against a really solid Tampa Bay Rays team that feasts against pitchers who struggle to get strikeouts. Nobody said the majors would be easy.
We do have 11 1/3 innings of big-league action as a reliever for Bibens-Dirkx, and that small sample paints some skepticism about his ability to get strikeouts. His swinging-strike rate is just 8.9%, which is much lower than you'd hope for a reliever. That number would be expected to go down as he stretches out into the rotation, amping up the concerns. In 23 2/3 innings in Triple-A (with half of his appearances coming out of the bullpen), Bibens-Dirkx's swinging-strike rate was 9.1%, furthering the thought that he may not be able to exploit the Rays' main (and potentially only) shortcoming offensively.
The second month of the season isn't even done yet, but we've already seen two different versions of Kevin Kiermaier in 2017. Back in April, dude was struggling big time, and it got him demoted to near the bottom of the order. He has done a complete 180 in May.
Monthly Splits | Hard-Hit Rate | Fly-Ball Rate | Strikeout Rate |
---|---|---|---|
April | 23.2% | 20.9% | 28.3% |
May | 35.0% | 35.5% | 23.8% |
With Kiermaier's price down at $2,900 on FanDuel and his peripherals shooting up, it's time to hop back on the bandwagon. He has stolen-base upside to boot, so he and Evan Longoria should likely be the centerpieces of a Rays stack against Bibens-Dirkx.