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. You likely already know to try to get bats at that offensive haven and don't need us to tell you. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Washington Nationals
The average hard-hit rate for a starting pitcher this year is 32.5%. If you're below that, you're probably faring well, assuming you can get some punchouts and aren't bathing in walks. If you swing too far above that line, then it's hard for anything to save you. The highest mark for a qualified starter is 42.0%.
In his five starts, Vance Worley has allowed a 52.2% hard-hit rate. Holy mother of negative outliers, Batman.
In other words, there's a reason Worley was in the bullpen until recently. He doesn't have the plate-discipline numbers to counter that with a 14.9% strikeout rate and 8.5% walk rate, and his ground-ball rate is just acceptable at 45.6%. You need to be tremendous in the other departments to make up for such wretched batted-ball data, and Worley absolutely is not. It forces us to give the Washington Nationals a big, long sniff tonight.
One interesting price point for the Nationals' offense is that of Ryan Zimmerman. He's down to $3,400 on FanDuel even though he finished the month of a July with a 39.7% hard-hit rate and 36.2% fly-ball rate. He's not quite on the level he was back in April, but Zimmerman's hitting better now than his price would indicate.
Ryan Zimmerman with his second SOLO SHOT of the day, giving him 24 home runs on the season #Nats
pic.twitter.com/ZgxDm6ETIj
— Around The Bases POD (@AroundBasesPOD) July 30, 2017
Pitching on this slate will allow you to roster the high-priced assets on the Nats. Zimmerman isn't really in that realm anymore, but he's hitting like he should be. Feel free to lock him in while the salary is low.