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.
Milwaukee Brewers
As a baseball fan, it was great to see Homer Bailey back on a mound over the weekend for the first time in 2017 after multiple elbow surgeries limited him to just two starts in 2015 and six in 2016. He's a guy you want to root for. But from a DFS perspective, Bailey's first start didn't go so well, and it raises questions about whether we should be targeting opposing batters until Bailey proves he's fully back.
In that first game back, Bailey lasted just 1 2/3 innings against the Washington Nationals, allowing eight runs on six hits with three walks and two strikeouts. When a guy's coming off of an elbow injury, that'll make you a bit nervous. On top of that, the Nationals made contact on 80.0% of their swings, and Bailey's swinging-strike rate was 9.8%. The swinging-strike rate is mildly encouraging, but is it enough to wipe out the rest of that outing? It could be. But right now, Bailey is a guy with just nine big-league starts under his belt since 2014, and his ERA in that span is 8.00. He should get back to form eventually, but it's clear that he's not there yet.
One player we'll have to track for the Milwaukee Brewers in the coming weeks is Jonathan Villar. Villar was wretched earlier in the season, and since coming off the disabled list this week, Villar has yet to crack the starting lineup. As such, his price on FanDuel has slid to $2,600. But when he was healthy last year, Villar swiped 62 bases while holding a 35.1% hard-hit rate. We know he can be a beast in DFS when everything is clicking. If he can wiggle his way into the starting lineup, it might not be bad to give him a sniff to see if the time off allowed him to regain last year's form. It's possible he'll continue to struggle, but with his price as low as it is, he's worth the gamble.