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.
Washington Nationals
David Hess recorded an xFIP of 4.44 in 2016, 4.27 in 2017, and 4.16 in 2018. So, he's been improving right? The problem is that all of this is data from the minor leagues. In the majors, Hess has had even more difficulty getting batters out, as you'd expect. He has a 13.0% strikeout rate compared to an 8.7% walk rate, and batters against him have posted a 49.5% fly-ball rate.
Only five teams strike out at a lower rate than the Washington Nationals (20.9%) do against right-handed pitching, and the Nationals also rank fifth in walk rate (9.5%) against right-handers.
Washington has this guy named Bryce Harper ($4,300) who is pretty cheap right now for how talented a player he is. The shift appears to be killing Harper's average, but he still has a 39.4% fly-ball rate and 42.9% hard-hit rate this year. You know Trea Turner ($3,800) has upside on any given night because of his steals, but he's added a bit more pop to his game with a 33.3% hard-hit rate on the season. Adam Eaton ($3,800) has a ridiculous 8.9% strikeout rate and 47.8% hard-hit rate this year.
Juan Soto ($3,800) has been crushing it since he came up, striking out just 19.1% of the time while hitting the ball hard 41.7% of the time. Anthony Rendon ($3,600) was an MVP candidate in 2017. In 2018, he's struck out just 16.1% of the time while recording a 43.8% fly-ball rate and 39.0% hard-hit rate. Daniel Murphy ($3,600) has a 142 wRC+ in his career with the Nationals.