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
Jason Hammel has had an excellent career for a 10th-round draft pick, but he appears to be running out of gas in his age-35 season. And that's literally speaking as his average fastball velocity is down considerably from what it was in recent seasons. His strikeout rate is just 14.7%, and he's allowed a 38.6% fly-ball rate and and 44.1% hard-hit rate.
While just about everyone is hitting Hammel these days, he's been especially poor against left-handed hitters in his career, allowing them to post a .338 wOBA against him, so we should favor left-handed bats in our stack when possible. It also doesn't hurt that the Oakland Athletics also own the highest hard-hit rate (41.0%) and third-highest fly-ball rate (38.2%) against right-handed pitching.
Khris Davis ($3,800) was born to "krush" home runs, and his batted-ball profile of a 47.2% fly-ball rate and 46.5% hard-hit rate explains exactly how he does it. Matt Olson ($3,700) is the left-handed bat we are looking for against Hammel; Olson has followed up his bonkers 2017 by posting a 41.7% fly-ball rate and 54.3% hard-hit rate. Jed Lowrie ($3,500) will also bat from the left side against Hammel, and he has posted a 41.1% fly-ball rate and 39.5% hard-hit rate in 2018.
One of the better cheap bats to use in general, even when he's not in as pristine a matchup as this one, is Matt Chapman ($3,000). So far this year, he has really delivered on the promise he showed in 2017 by hitting a fly-ball 39.5% of the time and hitting the ball hard 44.3% of the time.