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.
Note: With today's schedule being a bit wonky, the first two stacks will cover the main slate (6:35 p.m. EST), and the last two stacks will cover the early-only slate (2:05 EST).
New York Yankees
Going by ERA, Andrew Cashner was pretty solid a year ago for the Texas Rangers, notching a 3.40 ERA that ranked him 15th among 56 qualified starting pitchers. Cashner's 5.52 SIERA, however, tells a vastly different story. Cashner posted a 12.2% strikeout rate and 6.1% swinging-strike rate, and those are numbers we want to target relentlessly.
So it's time to fire up the New York Yankees, who were second as a team in wRC+ last year against right-handed pitching (110). Cashner doesn't possess noteworthy platoon splits as far as batted-ball numbers go, but he struck out just 12.0% of righties he faced last season. Yes, please.
It's hard to start any Yankees stack without talking about big boppers Aaron Judge ($4,000 on FanDuel) and Giancarlo Stanton ($4,500), and with their strikeout risk lowered due to the matchup with Cashner, they're in incredibly juicy spots. Against righties in 2017, Judge bombed away to the tune of a .364 ISO, 45.1% hard-hit rate and 42.1% fly-ball rate. In that same split, Stanton was equally rude to righty arms with a .326 ISO, 37.8% hard-hit rate and 39.0% fly-ball rate.
With those two priced up, finding some cheaper New York options is key, and catcher Gary Sanchez fits the bill at only $3,100. Sanchez is currently at a bit of a depressed price point thanks to only two hits in his first 23 at-bats this season, but he blasted righties in 2017 for a .249 ISO and 36.5% hard-hit rate.
To round out the stack, Brandon Drury is another cheaper Yanks option at $3,000. As a member of the Arizona Diamondbacks a year ago, Drury posted a .186 ISO against righties. And lefty Tyler Wade ($2,300) is worth mentioning. In 62 MLB plate appearances against righties, he hasn't done much of note (.210 wOBA), but he does have a 34.9% fly-ball rate in the split and would likely be the Yankees' cheapest starter if he's in the lineup.