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.
Chicago Cubs
If you were hoping that Matt Harvey needed just a change of scenery to get his season back on track, you have been sorely disappointed. As a member of the Cincinnati Reds, it's been much of the same for the pitcher that New York Mets fans once affectionately called the Dark Knight (ironically enough, both he and Batman were run out of town). As a Red, Harvey has just a 7.8% swinging-strike rate, and batters against him have a 41.7% fly-ball rate and 39.6% hard-hit rate.
The Chicago Cubs are a strong offense to target in general as they rank first in the National League in wOBA (.327) against right-handed pitching.
Even though he endured a 24-game homerless streak this season, the longest such drought of his career, Kris Bryant ($4,100) is still putting up his usual numbers. He has a 44.6% fly-ball rate and 36.3% hard-hit rate this year. Anthony Rizzo ($4,000) and his usual blend of contact (13.1% strikeout rate) and power (39.5% fly-ball rate and 33.8% hard-hit rate) put him in play, as usual. Javier Baez ($3,900) had an injury scare last Sunday, but he's healthy and offers upside with his bat (36.4% hard-hit rate) and speed (12 steals on season).
Kyle Schwarber ($3,500) has a 38.8% fly-ball rate and 40.7% hard-hit rate this year against right-handed pitching. Willson Contreras ($3,000) has had his struggles this year, but he has cut his strikeout rate to 18.7% and you'll have a unique lineup if you use him in the catcher/first base slot. Ben Zobrist ($2,800) is walking more than he is striking out while hitting the ball hard 34.0% of the time. Jason Heyward ($2,700) is having his best offensive year as a Cub as his strikeout rate is just 11.3% while his fly-ball rate (41.9%) and hard-hit rate (32.7%) are both the best marks he has had in more than five years.