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.
Detroit Tigers
James Shields had a stretch in May where he was dismissing dudes with authority and wallowing in strikeouts. It's safe to say that time is in the past. His swinging-strikeout is down to 6.1% over his past three starts, and that's not enough to hold down an offense as good as the Detroit Tigers'.
We want to keep a watchful eye on Shields' strikeouts because they are essentially his only safeguard against getting totally bombarded. His hard-hit rate this year is up to 33.2% -- his highest since 2010 -- and his 14.7% soft-hit rate is well below the league average of 18.8% for starters. The Tigers have been a bit too indulgent with that third strike at times, but when they're allowed to make contact, they can do some silly things.
J.D. Martinez with the two-run homerun! #Tigers pic.twitter.com/6xYiBFJruu
— Aaron Johnson (@AJohnsonSports) May 10, 2016
Line-drive dongs? That's just how J.D. Martinez rolls. Over the past two weeks, he has a 37.8% hard-hit rate thanks in part to a 32.4% line-drive rate. Martinez is certainly a better hitter against lefties, but Shields' hard-hit rate to righties (34.3%) is higher than what he allows to lefties, making Martinez one of the higher-upside hitters on the slate.