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.
Toronto Blue Jays
Austin Bibens-Dirkx was straight dealing in his most recent start, holding the Washington Nationals to just one run on three hits over seven stout innings en route to a victory. That's great, and with it being just his second start in the majors, we should take it into account. But the larger body of work says we can use hitters facing this guy.
Even including that game, Bibens-Dirkx has thrown 24 2/3 innings in the majors with over half of that coming in relief. His SIERA is 5.20 with a 13.1% strikeout rate and 7.7% swinging-strike rate, numbers against, which we will happily stack. He has paired that with a 37.2% hard-hit rate and 42.3% fly-ball rate, both of which are right where we want them to be. There's really nothing in Bibens-Dirkx's peripheral stats pushing us away from targeting batters who are facing him. That appeal goes up when he's in hot and humid weather against a team that can bang like the Toronto Blue Jays.
The Blue Jays in general aren't an easy team to stack on a slate that includes Clayton Kershaw and Corey Kluber as the pitching options. But they've got three value sticks in the top seven spots in the order, all of whom have some sort of appeal against righties.
| Versus RHP in 2017 | Hard-Hit Rate | Fly-Ball Rate | Position | FanDuel Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kevin Pillar | 26.1% | 30.3% | OF | $2,900 |
| Troy Tulowitzki | 30.5% | 37.8% | SS | $2,700 |
| Russell Martin | 33.3% | 24.4% | C | $2,200 |
Kevin Pillar's numbers are the most underwhelming, but he has been trending up a bit of late, with 13 of his past 36 balls in play being hard-hit. None of these guys are flashy. However, they're cheap, they can fill difficult positions, and they benefit from a great matchup in a hitter-friendly park. We can accept some imperfections when all of those stars align.