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. As always, we will not be including today's game at Coors Field here. You likely already know you want to load up on bats there, and you don't need me to tell you. Try to get as many Colorado Rockies bats as you can today, but here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Washington Nationals
More often than not, you won't want to target an offense if it's likely to be without a superstar hitter. That player adds value to the entire lineup, meaning when he's not there, the team is likely to be overpriced. Here, I couldn't care less whether or not Bryce Harper plays; you're still going to want your fill of the Washington Nationals.
Since the start of last year, there are two Nationals batters with hard-hit rates of at least 42.0% against lefties, and neither is Harper (though he is right behind at 41.7%). Jayson Werth is up at 42.1%, and to find Ryan Zimmerman, you need to shoot all the way up the leaderboards to 48.0%. That's the second best in the league among all hitters with at least 100 plate appearances against lefties over that span. Add in the potential for a cheap Michael Taylor at the top of the order, and you can see why we might be a bit forgiving about Harper's availability.
The reason we want to load up on Nationals is that the Adam Morgan's struggles from his rookie season have, unfortunately, returned. Even though he had great strikeout numbers in Triple-A, his rate has tumbled to 13.6% in the majors with a 7.6% walk rate and 35.3% ground-ball rate. We should expect his strikeout rate to increase thanks to his 10.5% swinging-strike rate, but even after that, it'll be hard to hold down these big boppers.