4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 9/2/15
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. As always, these stacks do not include today's game at Coors between the Diamondbacks and the Rockies. However, the over/under is 11 for a reason. I just don't need to tell you to stack at Coors. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
New York Yankees
When it comes to looking at Vegas lines in daily fantasy sports, it should grab your attention when a road team is -144 in a game with an over/under of 8.5. This is far from an auto-stack situation, but it means that road team needs to be on your radar. That's the case tonight with the Yankees facing the Boston Red Sox.
Henry Owens has been a fun little cookie so far through his first five big-league starts, averaging 8.38 strikeouts per nine innings. That number, though, is coupled with a return of the high walk totals he experienced earlier this season in the minors and a low ground-ball rate. Those are probably things that will improve as he gets older, but it creates opportunity for his opponents in daily fantasy in the short term.
I'd like to go ahead and pump someone not named Chris Young as a bat to own in the Yankees lineup, but that's not happening today, mis amigos. Young crushed lefties from 2006 to 2012 before seeing his numbers slip in 2013 and 2014. Now, they're back with a vengeance, baby. His pricing is still low, too, allowing you to pay up for other guys with high isolated slugging marks against lefties such as Alex Rodriguez, Brian McCann, and Carlos Beltran.
Toronto Blue Jays
When Trevor Bauer is good, he's rull good. When he's not, watch out, y'all. He could go either way tonight, but when he's facing a team as lethal as the Blue Jays, I want ownership just in case things get nuclear.
So far this season, Bauer has made 26 starts. In nine of them, he has allowed one run or fewer. However, in eight other starts, he has allowed five or more earned runs. His 38.7 ground-ball percentage leads to dongs, so if a team can get guys on base, they can put Bauer in a tight spot. The Blue Jays just so happen to have the highest on-base percentage (and pretty much everything else) against righties, so this one has the potential to be big.
Because Bauer does have solid strikeout capability, it isn't a bad idea to target batters who are largely strangers to that third strike. This would cause me to gravitate toward Edwin Encarnacion and Jose Bautista on the expensive end with a little bit of Ben Revere on the opposite side. Additionally, both Bautista and Encarnacion have high walk rates. That could lead to a high volume of base runners on in front of Troy Tulowitzki if he stays in the five hole, upping his value to help counteract the drop in the batting order.
Kansas City Royals
How cool is it that Randy Wolf is still in the Majors? He made his debut on June 11th, 1999, a few days after I had finished first grade. It's pretty sweet to see him slanging it, but that doesn't make his low strikeout totals any less attractive for our purposes.
From 2003 to 2012, Wolf never had a SIERA lower than 4.07, and it topped out at 5.26 in 2006 during a shorter season with Philadelphia. Unless he has found some magic elixir to eradicate fly balls, the Royals should be able to plate some runs with him on the mound.
The Royals, quite frankly, haven't been that great against lefties this year, ranking 19th in wOBA. They do, however, put the ball in play, striking out just 14.8 percent of the time. Also, Alex Gordon's return should help. His hard-hit rates against lefties the past three seasons have been 31.4, 28.8 and 36.6 percent respectively. His bat, coupled with the utter domination of lefties from Lorenzo Cain and Ben Zobrist, gives you a respectable stack that should at least do well in cash games.
Pittsburgh Pirates
Of the four stacks today, this is the one about which I am least certain. It has been super boom-or-bust to stack against guys making their Major-League debut this year, and that's exactly what the Pirates get in Zach Davies. If it were a full slate, I might forgo it. However, I do see some upside in rolling the Jolly Rogers tonight.
Davies has posted a solid overall FIP of 3.36 on the season in 23 starts at Triple-A between the Milwaukee Brewers' and Baltimore Orioles' systems. Most of that is because he has done a nice job of keeping the ball in the park, having allowed only six home runs in 128 1/3 innings. That has made up for below-average marks in both walks and strikeouts. With that being the case, the Pirates should be able to get base runners in the contest, even if they're not slanging long balls left and right.
In looking at Davies' platoon splits against in the minors, it's hard to get a good read on him. He is a right-handed pitcher, but he has a higher strikeout percentage against lefties (20.8 percent) than righties (17.0 percent). His walk numbers are almost even against batters of either handedness. This ambiguity would lead me to give preference to Pirates bats who hit right-handed pitching hardest. The four batters who have hard-hit rates greater than 32.0 percent against righties are Andrew McCutchen, Pedro Alvarez, Neil Walker, and Jung Ho Kang, so let's ride and see what happens.
