Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for Thursday 8/19/21
Stacks are the backbone of cashing daily fantasy baseball lineups. Correlation drives upside, creating the potential to place high or even win GPPs when your selected stacks explode offensively.
This column will do the digging and the dirty work to determine which stacks are worth rostering each day. Scoring upside will fuel the stacks that get the nod. Sometimes that will lead to chalky selections, but contrarian stacks will get their fair share of love too.
In addition to utilizing the touted daily stacks in handbuilt lineups, numberFire premium members can throw these highlighted stacks into an optimized lineup using our DFS Sharpstack tool. Our hitting heat map tool is also available to premium members looking for more stacking options. It provides valuable info such as implied total, park factors, and stats for identifying the quality of the opposing pitcher.
Let's take a look at the top stacks on today's main slate.
New York Yankees
The New York Yankees have a great matchup with the exceptionally lucky John Gant. The righty's 3.49 ERA is considerably lower than all of his ERA estimators, including his 5.53 expected ERA (xERA), 5.24 expected fielding independent pitching (xFIP), and 5.68 skill-interactive ERA (SIERA). Additionally, he's walked 15.2 percent of batters he's faced and only struck out 18.1 percent of them, per FanGraphs.
Gant's a ticking time bomb. He's not great against righties, allowing a pedestrian .304 weighted on-base average (wOBA). Yet, he's more giving to lefties, ceding a .334 wOBA to them.
Gant's below-average ability to miss bats moves New York's best power hitters to the top of the list for stacking. Aaron Judge ($4,300), Giancarlo Stanton ($3,600), and Gary Sanchez ($2,500) don't hold the platoon advantage, but I like all three. However, Anthony Rizzo ($3,500) and Joey Gallo ($3,800) have the platoon advantage, enhancing the appeal of stacking them. The lowest isolated power (ISO) against righties this year among that group is .198, and the lowest weighted runs created plus (wRC+) is 101. Not too shabby.
Los Angeles Dodgers
The Los Angeles Dodgers closed their series with the Pittsburgh Pirates with fireworks last night. Tonight, they invite the New York Mets and a struggling Taijuan Walker to town.
Walker's started nine games since Major League Baseball cracked down on foreign substance usage by pitchers. In those starts, he's been tattooed for a 6.02 ERA, 5.44 xFIP, and 5.31 SIERA. Walker's also served up an eye-popping 2.49 homers per nine innings. He's reeling, and the Dodgers are an unenviable matchup for him.
Los Angeles ranks second in wRC+ (113) against righties this season. They're also clobbering the ball since the Major League Baseball trade deadline, training second with a 124 wRC+. The Dodgers continue to rotate through resting players, making it difficult to pinpoint specific top options. They're stackable from top to bottom.
Having said that, while it feels like point chasing, Max Muncy ($4,000), Corey Seager ($3,200), and A.J. Pollock ($3,000) each homered -- twice for Muncy -- last night and are great options tonight. If they're all in the lineup, they're among my favorite stacking options.
Joshua Shepardson is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Joshua Shepardson also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username bchad50. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his/her personal views, he/she may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his/her personal account. The views expressed in his/her articles are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.
