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.
New York Yankees
Eric Surkamp's first two starts for the Oakland Athletics haven't gone quite as swimmingly as planned. He has issued five walks while striking out three, and that's bad news when you're heading to the hitter's dream that is Yankee Stadium.
This is largely a continuation of some previous struggles for Surkamp as his nine career starts have resulted in an 8.5% strikeout and 11.6% walk rate. That will lead to base runners, and then his 31.0% ground-ball rate can lead to dingers. With the wind currently looking like it may be blowing out to right at 14 miles per hour, it's time to load up on the Bronx Bombers.
The luxury of stacking the New York Yankees is that you can both save some salary and take advantage of players who have been struggling. Aaron Hicks, Starlin Castro, and Brian McCann all come at low prices while providing solid splits against lefties, and then there's Alex Rodriguez. He's gotten off to a brutal start with a .118/.231/.294 slash through 39 plate appearances, and there's reason for concern with his 33.3% strikeout rate. But A-Rod murdered lefties with a 38.2% hard-hit rate and 44.5% fly-ball rate last year. He might be washed up, but he's still worthy of some exposure in a matchup like this.