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.
Detroit Tigers
The Detroit Tigers are not a team you should stack in cash games tonight. It's far too risky to do so with the strikeouts that Ian Kennedy can generate when he's on. But for tournaments, there may not be a better team than this one.
The strikeouts are just one aspect of Kennedy's game, though it is a major one for assessing risk in DFS. All the rest point toward stacking against him. Kennedy's walk rate is at 11.4%, his highest mark since he threw 39 2/3 innings for the New York Yankees back in 2008. Walks lead to run-scoring opportunities and volume, so we'll happily take that.
The big allure, though, is the batted-ball data, with opponents holding a 39.5% hard-hit rate and 50.8% fly-ball rate against him. To top it all off, Kennedy has struggled since coming off the disabled list at the end of May with his swinging-strike rate slipping to 8.2%. When you put all of that up against the team that easily leads the league in hard-hit rate against righties, bad things can happen in a hurry.
The strikeout risk with Kennedy does go down a bit with a left-handed batter at the dish, and there's one prominent batter who swings from that side just waiting to hop into your lineups.
Alex Avila lifts a solo home run to left field, tying the game at 2-2 in the bottom of the 4th inning!!! #WhosYourTiger pic.twitter.com/pbxEk1V9uX
— TheRenderMLB (@TheRenderMLB) June 17, 2017
That's Alex Avila, who's just $2,800 at catcher on FanDuel. Swoon. We had gushed over Avila earlier in the year due to his batted-ball data, and there has been no slowing down in that department. His hard-hit rate in the month of June is 57.5% with a 2.5% soft-hit rate. He's batting second, he's killing baseballs, and his matchup is elite. Even with the wind blowing in from right, Avila's a great play.