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.
Los Angeles Angels
With the likes of Jacob deGrom, Luis Severino, Corey Kluber, and Ross Stripling all taking the mound tonight, it will be hard to lay off those names even in GPPs, which will make it difficult to stack certain teams. Lucky for us, the Los Angeles Angels face one of tonight's weakest arms in Lucas Giolito, and they are surprisingly affordable across the board.
Giolito is in his own tier of dreadful pitching this year, holding the dubious honor of owning the league's worst SIERA among qualified starters (5.95), to go with a paltry 13.6% strikeout rate and 12.9% walk rate. Mike Trout ($4,500) ought to be licking his chops in this one, and this is about as great a price as we could hope for to roster the league's best player. You could cite any number of fantastic stats for Trout, who's sporting a .437 wOBA and .296 isolated power (ISO) this year.
Justin Upton ($3,400) always makes for a solid choice, posting a 45.9% hard-hit rate and .379 expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA). Kole Calhoun ($2,500) continues to be a stellar value as the leadoff man against righties, producing a red-hot .396 wOBA and .344 ISO since coming off the disabled list in June.
The value doesn't top there, either, with Andrelton Simmons ($2,900), Shohei Ohtani ($2,900), Ian Kinsler ($2,900), and Luis Valbuena ($2,000) all coming in on the cheap. Ohtani continues to show promise as a big league hitter, with a 40.8% hard-hit rate, .375 wOBA, and .235 ISO across 169 plate appearances. Valbuena isn't exactly lighting it up this year, but he is still capable of knocking one out of the park with a solid 38.7% hard-hit rate and 45.0% fly-ball rate against righties.