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.
Seattle Mariners
I hope all of you are as excited for this Doug Fister revenge game as I am. The enthusiasm is dampened a bit with Fister's average fastball velocity in his last start being two miles per hour faster than it was at the start of the year, but the Seattle Mariners still appear to be a viable option. Who doesn't love a little stroll down narrative street?
Truthfully, this one is about a lot more than just narrative as even an improved Fister has struggled this year. In that start where his velocity jumped, his swinging-strike rate was only 7.4% with an 81.6% contact rate. Both of those are better than where he was a few starts ago, so his 5.11 SIERA may exaggerate his shortcomings a bit, but they're not enough to hold down a team a 116 wRC+ against right-handed pitching.
In trying to compensate for his decreased velocity, Fister has been relying more on his curveball, a pitch he threw 13.7% of the time his last time out (he threw his fastball 74.7% of the time). Nelson Cruz showed last year that he can pummel curveballs, and he should benefit if Fister reverts back to his changeup, as well. There are some cheap options like Seth Smith and Adam Lind, but don't overlook the slightly high-priced slugger who could unleash a spanking today.