4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 9/1/17

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.

As always, the Coors Field game will be ignored for stacking purposes. You don't need me to tell you that's a smart game to target.

Now, let's get to the stacks.

Oakland Athletics

The Oakland Athletics haven't been great against lefties this year (.301 team wOBA), but when a righty takes the bump, they morph into a different animal, ranking 15th in team wOBA (.323) and 10th in hard-hit rate (33.4%).

Tonight, they'll face Mike Leake, the newly acquired starter of the Seattle Mariners, who was awful in August. In 25 1/3 innings pitched last month, Leake was roasted for an 8.88 ERA, .404 wOBA, and 37.8% hard-hit rate. Lefties particularly enjoyed Leake's August offerings, to the tune of a .494 wOBA and a 41.7% hard-hit rate.

Boog Powell sets the tone at the top of the lineup ($2,300), and he's posted a .963 OPS away from home this season. Jed Lowrie ($3,400), who's been far better as a lefty (116 wRC+) than a righty (94 wRC+), should man the three-spot, and with any luck, we could get treated to another Matt Joyce ($3,900) bomb.

Joyce is expensive, but he has been hammering right-handed pitching this year, logging a 32.4% hard-hit rate and 46.9% fly-ball rate. If you can't work Joyce in, for a bit cheaper lefty exposure, check out Matt Olson at $3,200. Olson is blasting righties with a 158 wRC+ this year, including a 40.0% hard-hit rate and 44.1% fly-ball rate.

Chicago White Sox

This was supposed to the year that Blake Snell progressed as a starter in the promising rotation of the Tampa Bay Rays.

This hasn't happened.

Over 98 2/3 innings pitched, there have been both good signs (9.9% swinging-strike rate, 4.29 ERA) and bad. Snell's 4.98 SIERA, for example, shows he still has some work to do.

Snell's strikeout rate has dipped down to 20.4% this season, and his command has also been an issue. He's walked 11.5% of batters, and his 53.3% first-pitch strike rate would rank second-to-last among qualified starters, if he had enough innings to qualify.

He's eviscerated lefties with a .237 wOBA allowed, while righties have been far better at a .334 wOBA, 32.0% hard-hit rate, and 39.9% fly-ball rate, so let's focus on them for this stack.

The top of the Chicago White Sox is littered with affordable right-handed sticks, and they rank eighth in team wOBA against southpaws (.331) on the year. Tim Anderson ($3,100), Tyler Saladino ($2,200) and slugger Matt Davidson ($2,500) should all be at the top of the lineup, and there's not a lot of doubt when Davidson gets a hold of one.

For the year with the platoon advantage, Davidson's rocking a 109 wRC+, 31.2% hard-hit rate and 50.8% fly-ball rate. In total, this makes for a very strong stack while still being able to afford some expensive pitching options.

Milwaukee Brewers

The Milwaukee Brewers are desperately trying to keep pace with the Chicago Cubs in the National League Central, and if they want to do so, they'll need to hammer struggling starter Tanner Roark of the Washington Nationals.

And it could happen.

Over 149 2/3 innings pitched, Roark has posted a 4.44 SIERA, 8.6% walk rate, and his soft-hit rate has dropped from 23.1% last year to 15.7% this year.

Consistent with his career splits, Roark has been destroyed by lefty bats. In 2017, they have recorded a .356 wOBA, 30.4% hard-hit rate and 38.6% fly-ball rate, which has led to 1.69 home runs per nine innings pitched.

This could be a big problem tonight for Roark, as the Brewers can roll out a bunch of lefties that rock opposite-handed pitchers hard, and they check in seventh in hard-hit rate (33.9%) against righties. Check out four Brewers bats and their impressive batted-ball marks with the platoon advantage:

Not only are these dudes crushing, they're cheap. Throw in Miller Park ranking 10th (out of 60) in 2017 in park factor by handedness by Baseball Prospectus for lefties, and you have a tasty stacking option on your hands.

Baltimore Orioles

Joe Biagini of the Toronto Blue Jays has struggled as a starter, and those struggles seem worse when compared to his bullpen exploits:

Every metric for Biagini is worse as a starter, yet the Blue Jays will trot him out there again tonight. That should make the Baltimore Orioles' bats plenty happy, and we need to take advantage of that.

In analyzing the platoon split, lefties have enjoyed facing the right-handed Biagini, recording a 34.8% hard-hit rate and 31.3% fly-ball rate, so let's focus on lefties Chris Davis ($3,700), and a far cheaper option, Seth Smith ($2,400).

At home versus righties in 2017, Davis now owns a 43.8% hard-hit rate and 45.6% fly-ball rate, so fit him in if he's in your budget. Smith, meanwhile, mostly sees time when righties are on the mound, and has smacked them for an .896 OPS in Camden Yards this year.