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.
Tampa Bay Rays
If you want to beat the Tampa Bay Rays, you have to do one, ever-important thing: you gotta get them strikeouts, bruh. It's the one shortcoming they have offensively, and failure to exploit it can lead to destruction. Strikeouts aren't really in Christian Bergman's repertoire.
We have a 27-inning sample of Bergman in the Majors this year, and it paints serious skepticism around his ability to get third strikes. His swinging-strike rate is just 6.7%, validating the grossness behind his 12.6% strikeout rate. His batted-ball profile adds to those concerns with opponents clanging him for a 36.8% hard-hit rate and 44.0% fly-ball rate over his four trips through the rotation. The Rays are second in hard-hit rate against righties, so this pairing for Bergman really could not be worse.
Because Bergman struggles to get strikeouts, we can allow ourselves to check out guys who strikeout too much but can make some loud contact. Nobody fits this bill better than Colby Rasmus.
Colby Rasmus hits a solo home run to right-center to give the Rays a 4-2 lead in the bottom of the 7th inning!! #RaysUp pic.twitter.com/A9TBE65dF1
— TheRenderMLB (@TheRenderMLB) May 25, 2017
Rasmus has a whopping 37.5% strikeout rate against righties, but it comes with a 43.2% hard-hit rate and 46.5% fly-ball rate. Those are pretty spicy. Rasmus is the cheapest of the top seven batters in the Rays' projected order, so using him and Kevin Kiermaier may allow you to pay up for guys like Evan Longoria and Logan Morrison.