MLB

4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 4/7/16

Jim Sannes  —  @JimSannes Apr 7th, 2016
The Chicago Cubs bring their left-handed power bats into the desert with a great matchup to exploit on Thursday.

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. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Chicago Cubs

I would call this the chalk stack of the day, but I have never seen a piece of chalk yoke a ball 440 feet with the flick of a wrist.

Still, you are going to have to put up with heavy ownership if you want the Chicago Cubs in your life today.

The reason here is that a good chunk of people know that Arizona Diamondbacks starter Rubby De La Rosa struggles mightily against left-handed batters. This wouldn't be an issue if the Cubs were heavy with righties, but most of their big boppers swing from the left-hand side. What could go wrong?

Even if it means you're jumping around a bit in the batting order, I'd exclusively stack lefties in this one. De La Rosa's strikeout rate is 22.6% against righties compared to 14.6% against lefties. He also walks more left-handed batters, and his ground-ball rate falls almost 16 percentage points. Load up on lefties and bask in his 5.15 xFIP against them.

Kyle Schwarber and Anthony Rizzo are going to be two of the top-owned players on the slate, but make sure you get Dexter Fowler in there, too. He hits high in the order and brings upside with stolen bases, but he's also an extra-base threat. His fly-ball rate against righties for his career is 36.8%, and that increased to 38.6% last year. His price isn't cheap ($3,000 on FanDuel and $4,500 on DraftKings), but that may bring his ownership down a touch. Dex gon' give it to ya if you're willing to pay up.

Baltimore Orioles

The Baltimore Orioles are always in play when they're at Camden Yards and facing a righty. When that righty has a non-existent ground-ball rate and struggles to strikeout batters, your loins should start to tingle. That's what they've got today against Minnesota Twins righty Phil Hughes.

Hughes dealt with injuries last year, which may have contributed to his struggles, but it was basically a nightmare. His strikeout rate fell to 14.4%, which isn't enough to succeed when your ground-ball rate is 35.3%. The Orioles hit .278/.328/.451 against finesse pitchers in 2015, and with the additions of some new sticks, they could be even better this year.

Hughes doesn't have dramatic platoon splits, which is why Mark Trumbo is a fun target. Chris Davis and Manny Machado will be popular options, but Trumbo has nearly equal upside at a lower price. He'll also be able to benefit from their Gucciness by batting in the clean-up spot, giving Trumbo an extra bit of safety, as well.

Philadelphia Phillies

There is no safety of which to speak in this stack. Cincinnati Reds starter Robert Stephenson is making his Major League debut, meaning he'll likely either no-hit the Philadelphia Phillies or get bounced in the second. Shall we give it a try?

There are three main reasons to consider a stack against Stephenson. First, his control isn't quite the best part of his arsenal yet. His walk rate has been at least 11.0% each of the past three seasons in the minors, forcing him to stall out at Double-A for an extended period of time. Second, he is a heavy fly-ball pitcher with a 0.58 ground-ball to fly-ball ratio in the minors last year. When you're at Great American Ballpark -- which ranks fifth in three-year average home run park factor -- that's frightening. Finally, the wind is blowing out to left at 18 miles per hour. It may not be safe, but the upside is tantalizing.

Remember that wind? It was similar strength yesterday, but Maikel Franco launched an oppo taco right into its teeth.


That man strong. He hit nine home runs this spring and only had a 13.9% strikeout rate against righties last year. Plug him in and let the Gucciness flow over you.

Chicago White Sox

The big disadvantage of the O.co Coliseum is generally its temperature. Being off the ocean means the weather doesn't get warm enough to allow the ball to fly off the bat during the summer, shoving it down to 22nd in park factor and 27th in home run park factor. Today, though, this is the second-warmest game on the slate, and the wind is blowing out to dead center. Stacks of either of these teams could be fun, but the Chicago White Sox may hold an edge with Kendall Graveman on the bump for the Oakland Athletics.

Graveman is an intriguing player who had stretches of quality pitching last year, but they were book ended by struggles. His year-end SIERA was 4.43 largely due to a 15.3% strikeout rate. That dropped down to 14.3% against lefties, potentially giving them a bump, but it was still only 16.3% against righties.

Todd Frazier had a rough second half last year, but he has shown the past few years that he can murk right-handed pitching. His hard-hit rates in 2014 and 2015 were 36.0% and 37.0%, respectively, and that comes without an inflated strikeout rate. He's not cheap, but he may go a bit overlooked with people gravitating toward the Orioles and the Cubs for the slate.