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.
Oakland Athletics
Everyone loves them some Bartolo Colon, but our plump friend could be in for a short outing against the Oakland Athletics, who have a slate-high 5.34 implied team total on another hot and humid Texas night. Much of Colon's success has come from a fortuitous .228 BABIP, and his luck could be beginning to run out after getting shelled in two of his last three games. He's only managed a 16.5% strikeout rate, along with a 42.9% hard-hit rate allowed on the season.
The Athletics are always a fun team to stack because not only do they pack some major home run upside, but they rarely see their salaries get out of hand. Particularly with tonight's affordable pitching prices, it won't be difficult to fit in both Khris Davis ($3,600) and Matt Olson ($3,600) as a powerful one-two punch. Olson is showing last year's power display was no fluke, passing J.D. Martinez for the league lead in hard-hit rate (54.3%) and ranking among the best in average exit velocity.
Jed Lowrie ($3,400) is always a fine choice out of the three-hole, and although Marcus Semien ($3,300) only has modest pop he bats high in the order and isn't a bad way to fill the always shallow shortstop position. Matt Chapman ($2,900) also remains a nice value and with Matt Joyce (back) headed to the DL we could see Mark Canha ($2,500) or Chad Pinder ($2,400) hit higher in the order.
And make sure you don't forget about Dustin Fowler ($2,500), even if he is batting low in the order. He's shown nice upside with a 46.0% hard-hit rate and .203 isolated power (ISO), and can also add points with his legs, going 4-for-6 on stolen base attempts this year.