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.
Cleveland Indians
This hasn't been a fun year for Anibal Sanchez. Since losing his spot in the starting rotation, he has only made one start of nine total appearances. That came against the Cleveland Indians, who peppered him for four runs over five innings while blasting a pair of dingers. Who does Sanchez face today as he gets another crack as a starter? That same Cleveland squad. It's just not your season, friend.
Most pitchers will see an up-tick in strikeouts as they move to the bullpen, where they can throw harder thanks to the lower usage and shorter bursts on the bump. Sanchez's velocity did go up, but his strikeout rate actually fell while he was in the bullpen. The strikeouts were the only area in which Sanchez came close to average his first stint as a starter, and the loss of those could make him worse than the pitcher who had a 5.09 SIERA when plucked from the rotation.
The one positive that Sanchez gets in this matchup is that he has a bit of a reverse-splits tendency with a much higher strikeout rate against left-handed batters. That just won't be much of an aid when this guy is at the dish.
.@MikeNapoli25.
Hammy.
"Bring out the tape measure!"https://t.co/u8BXKxW6T8 #OnlyHerehttps://t.co/PXFUarcmLD
— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 5, 2016
Y'all's gonna give Cleveland play-by-play guy Tom Hamilton a heart attack. Uncool.
Mike Napoli has been striking out a ton against righties this year, but when he has made contact, he has done exactly as he did above with great regularity. He's sporting a 38.2% hard-hit rate and 41.2% fly-ball rate, numbers that'll make him a tremendous tourney target given Sanchez's struggles versus right-handed batters.