Each day here on numberFire, we'll be providing you with four potential offenses to stack in your daily fantasy lineups. These are the offenses that provide huge run potential on that given day based on matchups and other factors.
After reading through these suggestions, make sure to check out our daily projections. These can either let you know which players to include in each stack, or which guy best complements said stack.
Another great tool is our custom optimal lineups, which are available for premium subscribers. Within the tool, we've added the option to stack teams -- you choose the team you want to stack, show how many players you want to use within the stack, and the tool will create a lineup based on this that you can then customize.
Now, let's get to the stacks. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Kansas City Royals
I like Trevor May. I really do. He has a dope Twitter account and mixes his own music under the name, "DJ Heybeef." But when you were the seventh choice to be a member of the Minnesota Twins rotation, that screams "Stack me, baby."
May should develop into a solid back-end-of-the-rotation guy eventually, but he wasn't there yet last year when he was in the majors. In 45.2 innings, he had a 7.88 ERA and a 4.77 FIP. He showed flashes of being dominant with his 6-inning, 10-strikeout performance against the Chicago White Sox, but there's enough there for me to like the Royals' offense today.
This game has the highest over/under of the early slate at 8.5, and there are plenty of cheap options within the Royals' order. Their number-three hitter, Lorenzo Cain, was less than $4,000 on DraftKings yesterday. I'm not saying definitively that the Royals will post crazy numbers today as May does have the potential to break out, but they're a solid play with upsided goodiness.
Detroit Tigers
This one is less about the matchup and more about weather conditions and the fact that the Detroit Tigers are straight killin' it right now.
Through six games this season, the Tigers have been held beneath seven runs only once, when they defeated the Twins, 4-0, on opening day. As a team, they are slashing .355/.433/.550, all of which are tops in the leagues. They're going to regress eventually, but why not ride the lightning until they do?
On top of that, they are going to be playing in 80-degree weather. No other game in the early slate is forecasted to be above the low 70's. Getting this team into warm weather, coupled with their already scorching bats could spell trouble even for a guy with stuff as good as Gerrit Cole.
Toronto Blue Jays
Much like I love Trevor May, I also have a thing for Jake Odorizzi. He's young, he can rack up the strikeouts, and he had an awesome season-opening performance last week. But brudduh is flirting with disaster today.
Odorizzi had the second lowest ground-ball rate last year among qualified starters at 29.9 percent. That's not a terrible thing at Tropicana Field, which ranked 25th in ESPN's Home Run Park Factor last year. But when you're at Rogers Centre, which ranked third? That's a different story.
In 2014, Odorizzi had a silly-good 2.62 ERA at home. That would be Rookie-of-the-Year type stuff if he could sustain it on the road. Nope. There, his ERA inflated to 6.32. Part of that was because his BABIP against rose to .347, but he also allowed more than two home runs per nine innings. All of this is dependent on a crazy small sample size, but the splits were so wide that it's enough for me to roll out a Blue Jays stack today.
Los Angeles Angels
The "move Ross Detwiler back into the rotation" experience went pretty much as expected last week. Heal quickly, Yu Darvish.
Detwiler got rocked by the A's in his first start since 2013 to the tune of five earned runs (eight total) in just over four innings. numberFire projected Detwiler to have a season-long 4.32 ERA, so this shouldn't come as a huge shock. Today, it's the Angels' turn in the ring.
The unfortunate thing here is that DraftKings must have anticipated such a stack as the pricing on Angels players is bonkers for today. Mike Trout at $6,600? BRUH. I got bills to pay, homie. This means you may have to go for a shorter stack, or really cheap pitching options. But if you can find three players a bit lower in the order to plop into your lineup, it could pay serious dividends in a matchup like this.