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. As usual, we will not include today's game at Coors Field in these recommendations. You already know that you want bats at Coors when you can afford them, and you don't need us to tell you. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
New York Yankees
After tearing it up in Arlington all week, wouldn't you know it, the Oakland Athletics are actually upgrading their venue to Coors Field tonight. Even on a night with pricey studs like Chris Sale and Max Scherzer taking the mound, you can bet they'll be one of tonight's most popular stacks, along with the Colorado Rockies.
But if we're looking to stack elsewhere, the New York Yankees aren't too expensive for once, and have a stellar matchup against Brad Keller. Keller may have a 3.32 ERA and 57.2% ground-ball rate across 70 1/3 innings between the rotation and bullpen, but he otherwise holds lackluster marks, including a 4.63 SIERA, 15.1% strikeout rate and 9.9% walk rate. He's also somehow only allowed two home runs all year if only for an unsustainable 4.0% home-run-to-fly-ball rate. That number figures to rise tonight at Yankee stadium, where the Bronx Bombers are showing a 5.88 implied team total.
Sadly, Aaron Judge is out of the mix after being diagnosed with a fractured wrist last night, but we still have Giancarlo Stanton ($4,200) around for that multi-homer upside. Stanton has disappointing splits against righties this year, but a career 40.0% hard-hit rate and .262 isolated power (ISO) is nothing to sneeze at. Didi Gregorius ($3,500) is one of the slate's top shortstop plays, with a 38.9% hard-hit rate and .255 ISO against righties.
Brett Gardner ($3,200), Aaron Hicks ($3,100), and Greg Bird ($3,000) won't break the bank, and will enjoy the platoon advantage against Keller. With Judge out, Hicks could move up the order, and is showing a promising 38.5% hard-hit rate and 38.0% fly-ball rate versus right-handed pitching. Bird is boom-or-bust, but is producing a 42.4% hard-hit rate and .250 ISO in the platoon split.
Gleyber Torres ($3,500) offers all sorts of upside, with a 42.1% hard-hit rate, .375 wOBA, and .253 ISO through 249 plate appearances.