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.
Washington Nationals
It's still early in the season, but I think we're to the point with the Washington Nationals where we should target them whenever they're facing a mid-level lefty starter. They're up to third in wRC+ over a small sample size, and they're second in hard-hit rate, which stabilizes much more quickly. With how Brandon Finnegan's peripherals have shaped up, this is a pretty easy call.
Finnegan's transition to a full-time starter has brought about the rapid drop-off of his strikeout rate, which is down to 16.9% for the season. He has walked at least four batters in five different starts, and he has only had more than five strikeouts twice. You'd still assume he'll be a quality starter long-term, but for the interim, it's fully justified to stack against him.
No matter what happens, the leadoff hitter for the Nationals tonight is going to be a value. The three main candidates -- Chris Heisey, Michael Taylor, and Ben Revere -- are all $2,700 or less on FanDuel. Both Heisey and Taylor have the platoon advantage over Finnegan, but Finnegan's xFIP is slightly higher against lefties. They'd all be in play given their prices and the offense's potential, so check the order first while filling out your lineups.