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
We may never again have a slate this conducive to stacking. Three pitchers in our auto-stack category -- James Shields, Ubaldo Jimenez, and Matt Cain -- are all on the bump tonight. Finding high-upside hitters is not going to be difficult. We'll touch on all three of those guys in these recommendations, starting with Shields against the Toronto Blue Jays.
We now have 34 innings of data on Shields since he returned from the disabled list, which is a pretty decent sample. In those 34 innings, he still has allowed more earned runs (30) than he has strikeouts (22), and his walk total (18) is in the strikeout total's tailpipes. This has pushed his SIERA up to 5.85 with a 36.8% hard-hit rate and 42.4% fly-ball rate. Those numbers are hard to match from a stacking perspective. As a result, he has allowed at least six earned runs in three of his seven starts, and he has given up nine home runs. The Blue Jays' offense may not be what they were in years past, but they can likely exploit that.
One way to differentiate on a slate where stacking seems so obvious is finding ways to pivot within an individual team. The Blue Jays provide you with a natural way of doing so in having both Justin Smoak and Kendrys Morales on their roster. They're both eligible at first base on FanDuel, so if you use one, you can't use the other. While Smoak is objectively the better option, that doesn't mean we shouldn't pivot to Big Ken.
Kendrys Morales mashes a solo home run off Blake Treinen to pull the Blue Jays even in the bottom of the 9th with his second long ball!!! pic.twitter.com/lFsHkSPJ7p
— TheRenderMLB (@TheRenderMLB) July 27, 2017
Not only is Morales likely to be the lower-owned of the two, but he also comes at a discount of $1,100. That should be enough to make up for the discrepancy in their respective fly-ball rates. It's fine to pay for Smoak if you can and are willing to swallow the potential for higher ownership, but there's plenty to love in what Morales presents.