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.
New York Yankees
The New York Yankees will be without Aaron Judge for a fourth straight game after the star slugger suffered a chip fracture to his right wrist. If the first three games are any indication, though, the Yankees' offense will be just fine. The Bronx Bombers have managed at least five runs in three straight, scoring six Sunday against the Kansas City Royals.
As a team, they've hit to a 39.3% hard-hit rate and .389 wOBA with a small 13.9% strikeout rate in the last three. And we shouldn't expect things to be any different tonight against the Baltimore Orioles' Yefry Ramirez. In five big league starts, the 24-year-old has a 4.24 ERA and an even worse 4.50 xFIP. He has a respectable 27.0% strikeout rate, but a 50.0% fly-ball rate and 10.0% walk rate are exploitable, especially for a Yankees team sporting a slate-best implied total of 5.60 runs.
With Ramirez allowing a .371 wOBA and 53.8% fly-ball rate to left-handed hitters so far (albeit in a small sample of 52 plate appearances), let's start with the likes of Didi Gregorius ($3,700) and Aaron Hicks ($3,500), who are in line to hit third and fourth in the order. Against righties, Gregorius owns a .351 wOBA and .246 ISO on the year, and those move to .400 and .304, respectively, at home. As for the switch-hitting Hicks, he owns a .727 wOBA with 3 walks in 11 plate appearances absent Judge. And for the year, he's at a .353 wOBA and 38.3% hard-hit rate against right-handed hurlers.
Giancarlo Stanton ($4,300) presents a risk at his price due to his 32.5% strikeout rate versus righties, but he has the pop to pay off in a big way.
To fill out the rest of your Yankees stack, you can look at some combination of mid- and lower-priced options. Brett Gardner ($3,400) and Greg Bird ($3,400) come in at the same price and hit from the left side. Gardner provides safety with a 12.0% walk rate and 14.6% strikeout rate in the split while Bird brings upside via a .234 ISO against righties. Young righties Miguel Andujar ($3,400) and Gleyber Torres ($3,700) are also in play with 37.7% and 39.7% hard-hit rates, respectively, against same-sided pitchers.
While the Yankees are rather expensive, Neil Walker ($2,700) could provide some salary relief further down the order, allowing you to pay up for one of the top-shelf arms -- like Trevor Bauer ($11,800) -- in the pitching pool.