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.
Atlanta Braves
Things haven't been going so hot for Matt Cain recently. He started the year off well, finishing April with a 2.30 ERA. Since then, that number has inflated to 6.56, and his peripheral stats indicate that it's not due to bad luck. That's scary for the San Francisco Giants, but it has to have the Atlanta Braves licking their chops.
A key component in Cain's April competency was his ability to limit hard contact. In that month, his hard-hit rate was 26.8%, which would be one of the league's best marks had he sustained it. He didn't. Instead, Cain has allowed a 34.5% hard-hit rate since the start of May, which is a good chunk above league average. Add in his 10.7% strikeout rate and 10.3% walk rate, and you can see why we'd be itching to target bats against him.
Tyler Flowers' trajectory has been essentially the opposite of Cain's in 2017. He started May off struggling to loft the ball with just a 17.1% fly-ball rate. That numbers has gone up just a wee bit since.
This was awesome to be there to see! RT @Braves: Watch Tyler Flowers deliver a game winner in the 9th... pic.twitter.com/fl51U0sB4r
— Jeff Slanovec (@JeffSlanovec) June 13, 2017
Go-ahead, oppo-taco dinger in the ninth inning? That'll play. And it's not unexpected with Flowers upping his fly-ball rate to 37.5% in May and 45.9% in June. It's hard to find power at the catcher position, but Flowers has it. He'll run you $3,100 on FanDuel, and Matt Adams, Matt Kemp, and Nick Markakis are all $3,400 or lower. This is an affordable stack that is oozing upside.