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
There isn't really an aspect of pitching that Reynaldo Lopez does well. He has just an 8.7% swinging-strike rate and an elevated 9.9% walk rate this season. He's also allowed a 46.2% fly-ball rate and 34.2% hard-hit rate.
In 2018, the New York Yankees rank ninth in walk-to-strikeout ratio, third in wOBA (.333), and sixth in fly-ball rate (37.5%) against right-handed pitching. And with the Yankees trio of Aaron Judge, Didi Gregorius, and Gary Sanchez still mending from injuries on the shelf, a lot of the pressure to carry this lineup has fallen on the powerful shoulders of Giancarlo Stanton ($4,600). Despite a poor start to the year, Stanton is up to 32 home runs thanks to a 43.1% hard-hit rate.
Gleyber Torres ($4,000) is one of the best young players in baseball, as he launched the longest home run of his career last night. He's got 20 home runs in less than 100 games thanks to a 43.0% fly-ball rate and 38.7% hard-hit rate in his rookie campaign.
As good as Torres has been, teammate Miguel Andujar ($4,000) might be having the better rookie season. Andujar has leveraged a 17.0% strikeout rate and 35.9% hard-hit rate to hit 61 extra-base knocks.
Aaron Hicks ($3,900) is a classic example of why we need sabermetrics in baseball. With his .251 batting average, he wouldn't have gotten the credit he deserved decades ago, but it's 2018 and we can give him the credit he deserves now. He's got a 19.2% strikeout rate, 37.9% fly-ball rate, and 41.1% hard-hit rate.
Brett Gardner ($3,400) is the everyday leadoff man against right-handed pitching. He owns a 110 wRC+ against right-handed pitching since the start of the 2016 season. Neil Walker ($2,800) has also hit righties exceptionally well this season while serving as a utility man for New York this season, even filling in at right field. Along with his defensive versatility, he's delivered a 35.6% fly-ball rate and 39.8% hard-hit rate against right-handed pitching. Austin Romine ($2,500) gives you a 36.8% hard-hit rate versus righties out of the catcher spot.