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
Opening Day has finally arrived, and while that means most of our favorite aces are taking the mound today, all that elite pitching doesn't exactly lend itself to stacking in DFS.
But not all pitching staffs are created equally, and there are only so many stellar hurlers like Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander to go around.
In the case of the Baltimore Orioles, their Opening Day starter is none other than Andrew Cashner, arguably not only the worst starter of the day, but one who wouldn't even crack the rotation of many squads. Cashner posted some rather ugly numbers in 2018, including a 5.33 SIERA, 14.5% strikeout rate, and 9.5% walk rate -- not exactly your typical Opening Day material.
Add in an offensive juggernaut in the New York Yankees in hitter-friendly Yankee Stadium, and we get easily the highest implied total on the board (5.44), the only one to exceed 5.00 on the day. It's safe to say the Bronx Bombers will be the chalkiest stack money can buy.
But while you might want to get exposure to other lineups in tournaments, you're still going to want a piece of this top matchup. The always dangerous duo of Aaron Judge ($4,600) and Giancarlo Stanton ($4,300) may cost you an arm and a leg, but there's also some value to be found in this lineup in Brett Gardner ($2,700) and Greg Bird ($2,300). Gardner will be immensely popular as the likely leadoff man, and while Bird will presumably slot lower in the lineup, he owns a career 40.2% hard-hit rate and 50.6% fly-ball rate that's well-suited for some cheap power upside.
Gary Sanchez ($3,300) and Luke Voit ($3,500) also bring home run power to the table at reasonable prices. Sanchez was terrible in 2018 but slugged 33 home runs with a .253 ISO as recently as 2017. Voit was sensational following a trade to the Yankees last year, and while it's difficult to say how much of that performance is here to stay, smacking barrels at the rate he did in 2018 will surely get our attention.
Needless to say, there's a lot to love in this spot, so stack to your heart's content -- just be sure to differentiate yourself with either a contrarian pitcher and/or some lesser-owned hitters in tournaments.