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.
Oakland Athletics
When you're a team that strikes out a ton while also making hard contact, you're in a zone where we will happily use pitchers against you in DFS or stack your offense if it's the right matchup. The Oakland Athletics could be the posterboys of this class. They're up to third in strikeout rate against righties while also sitting sixth in hard-hit rate and first in fly-ball rate. We'll take those marks in a matchup with Jose Urena.
Urena is one of just a few guys who meets every criteria we look for in a stacking candidate. As a starter, his SIERA is 5.52 with a 15.4% strikeout rate and 11.1% walk rate. That's right where we want him to be. Then you toss in a 34.8% hard-hit rate and 43.4% fly-ball rate, and you see the upside he presents. There aren't many situations more conducive to stacking than this, and with the way the A's can bop it, we should be giddy about the opportunity.
The only problem with stacking the A's is that they present you with a tough dilemma. Do you roll out Chad Pinder or Jed Lowrie at second base? They're both eligible at the same spot on FanDuel, and they hit second and third in the order. Which one do you prefer?
| Versus RHP in 2017 | Hard-Hit Rate | Fly-Ball Rate | Strikeout Rate | FanDuel Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chad Pinder | 35.4% | 50.0% | 29.5% | $2,600 |
| Jed Lowrie | 37.7% | 46.4% | 13.9% | $2,400 |
Thankfully, their profiles make it pretty clear for what situations they are best suited. Lowrie is your guy in cash games due to his low strikeout rate. But you can also easily use Pinder in a tournament due to his increased fly-ball rate and dinger potential. So, it's likely ideal to choose the player based on which game type you're playing, but you can also take the $200 savings on Lowrie if you need it in a tourney.