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. As always, today's game at Coors Field will not be included in these recommendations. Although Coors Field is an offensive haven, you likely already know that and don't need us to tell you. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Toronto Blue Jays
Earlier in the year, we wouldn't have been inclined to stack a righty-heavy team like the Toronto Blue Jays against Mike Pelfrey. Pelfrey has plenty of shortcomings, but he keeps right-handed batters on the ground 60.7% of the time as a starter, and their hard-hit rate is just 25.2%. But with all the changes in the Chicago White Sox's bullpen, we have to change our thinking, and it allows us to use the Blue Jays today despite the imperfections.
Pelfrey hasn't thrown more than five innings in a game since June 17th. That means every time he has gone out there, the bullpen has thrown almost half of the innings or even more. When they had Tommy Kahnle, David Robertson, and Anthony Swarzak, that was a bit of a buzzkill for DFS. But with all three gone in various trades, the White Sox's active roster has the third-worst bullpen SIERA in the league. They're no longer a detriment to stacking; they're a full-on plus. When they're throwing for half the game, it means we can target righties against Pelfrey even though the batted-ball data tells us not to.
That said, we should still give heavy preference to left-handed batters as they have a 34.4% hard-hit rate and 42.7% fly-ball rate against Pelfrey as a starter. The Blue Jays don't have many guys on that side, but they do have a few of note.
| Versus RHP in 2017 | Hard-Hit Rate | Fly-Ball Rate | Position | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Justin Smoak | 41.0% | 43.4% | 1B | $4,000 |
| Kendrys Morales | 37.6% | 32.1% | 1B | $2,800 |
| Ryan Goins | 28.2% | 38.6% | 2B | $2,300 |
| Miguel Montero | 29.9% | 42.5% | C | $2,300 |
| Ezequiel Carrera | 25.5% | 25.4% | OF | $2,500 |
| Nori Aoki | 20.6% | 21.4% | OF | $2,500 |
Clearly, the top guys here are Justin Smoak and Kendrys Morales, both of whom are great options at first base. But Ryan Goins has hit seventh each of the past two nights, and he can put the ball in the air. The same is true with Miguel Montero if he wiggles his way into the lineup. The righties are fine given the White Sox's issues in the bullpen, but the top four guys in the chart above would be mighty tempting if they wind up starting.