4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 9/28/15
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. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Toronto Blue Jays
As we enter the final week of the MLB regular season, things are likely to get a little weird. Teams that are out of contention may be more likely to get the young pups some time as they ride things out, while the teams locked into the postseason may sit their veterans in order to rest them up. We've got the latter going tonight in Baltimore as the Blue Jays take the field with visions of October dancing in their heads.
While this is all fine and dandy for the wonderful people of Toronto, it can make stacking a bit dicey. If the Blue Jays decide to rest Josh Donaldson, that lowers the expected run output for the team that night fairly significantly. That's something of which to be mindful as you're filling out your rosters -- make sure that the team's big boppers are in the lineup, or else you may unnecessarily be stacking a team that has already mailed it in for the stretch.
Assuming all systems are a go for the Jays, they've got some solid run potential for tonight with Chris Tillman on the bump. Tillman holds a 4.68 SIERA through his 29 starts on the season, thanks to issuing 3.31 walks per nine innings and holding a mediocre ground-ball rate at 43.8 percent. Walks combined with a low ground-ball rate are no bueno, brudduh. That is especially true against an offense with as much dongability as the Jays'. If they've got their sluggers ready to hack away, feel free to stack away on the Jays today.
Boston Red Sox
This is a stack inspired by the divine soul that is Mookie Betts. I had never been to a game at Fenway prior to Friday, so I'm just going to assume he leaps tall buildings and mercilessly robs dudes of long balls in every contest. Praise be unto Mookie, and praise be unto a Red Sox team that is as hot as they come right now.
This isn't some sort of new, magical revelation for the team, either; they've been raking the entire second half. They sit fifth in wOBA since the All-Star break at .333, and you can bet David Ortiz has had a say in that. Big Papi is slashing .317/.393/.683 with 21 home runs in the second half. He's one of those guys who qualifies as a must-have when you're stacking this band of hombres.
This locomotive now heads to New York to take on the Yankees tonight with Ivan Nova on the bump. Nova showed progress his last time out, holding the Blue Jays to one run on 4 hits over 5 2/3 innings, but things still aren't fully back for the righty post-surgery. In his 15 starts since coming back from Tommy John, Nova has a 4.67 xFIP. He has struck out exactly one batter in 4 of his starts and 3 or fewer on 10 occasions. The ball is being put in play with regularity, and that can be a dangerous game to play against a team that has the sticks that Boston does right now.
Detroit Tigers
It is beyond frustrating to stack against heavy fly-ball pitchers like Colby Lewis. Because this strategy is dependent on balls leaving the yard, and that only happens on roughly 10.0 percent of fly balls, you're going to have some fairly heavy variance. That's a game I am willing to play with the Tigers in town against the Texas Rangers.
The Tigers have posted -- by far -- their best numbers this year against fly-ball pitchers. They have slashed .277/.332/.442 on the season, their best marks in all three categories between average pitchers and ground-ball specialists. Additionally, they have spanked pitchers low in strikeouts (such as Lewis) around the yard with a .298/.346/.468 slash. This is a formula that could easily lead to good things for the offense.
I've mentioned here before that Ian Kinsler loves fly-ball pitchers, making him a good target for tonight, but Nick Castellanos does the same. He's hitting .245/.286/.452 against fly-ball pitchers this year (not an overly impressive mark, but that .207 isolated slugging is of note), and he slaps the low-strikeout guys around at a .283/.321/.493 clip. Any time you lower the odds of a strikeout, good things are likely to happen for Castellanos, as is the case in this one.
Los Angeles Dodgers
The Dodgers have lost seven of their last nine games, falling to now only six games up on the San Francisco Giants for the top spot in the National League West. Time to panic? Nah. With a matchup against those Giants on the horizon, the bats may now be ready to snap out of hibernation.
In order to do so, they'll have to best Giants' righty Jake Peavy. The 34-year-old hurled six shutout innings in his last start, but his xFIP still sits up at 4.42 on the year. Over his 17 starts, Peavy has been held below five strikeouts on 10 occasions. The park factor in AT&T is great for pitchers, but the outfield is expansive enough to let dinky stuff fall in when teams can put the ball in play.
Because the odds of finding a long ball are so much lower when playing in San Francisco, I'm targeting players with heavy line-drive and hard-hit rates against righties. Three guys on the team -- Justin Turner, Andre Ethier, and Adrian Gonzalez -- all hold line-drive percentages of 27.0 percent or higher against righties this year. Gonzalez is expected to return to the lineup today, so those are the top three guys in this lineup I'd be targeting tonight.
