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. Coors is great for DFS, but you likely don't need me to tell you that. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Toronto Blue Jays
The magic done run out on James Paxton. He had at least five strikeouts each of his first six starts this year; over the past three, he has totaled five. His fastball is still buzzing along at 98 miles per hour, but even against a couple of high-strikeout offenses like the Houston Astros and Baltimore Orioles, his punchouts have dried up. Time to fire up old reliable and stack the Toronto Blue Jays against a lefty.
Part of the issue in Paxton's recent stretch is that he has had difficulty finding the strike zone. He put 49.9% of his pitches in the zone in those six starts before July, but that has fallen to 43.1% this month. This dip in strikeouts pushes further focus on his batted-ball stats, and Paxton's hard-hit rate this year is 33.1% with a 9.0% soft-hit rate, easily the lowest mark in the league among all pitchers who have thrown at least 50 innings. The Blue Jays may not be what they were last year, but they can still jump all over that.
There are four healthy, every-day players on the Blue Jays with hard-hit rates above 40.0% against lefties. Who's first, though? It's the guy hitting clean-up for just $2,600 on FanDuel and $3,600 on DraftKings.
Russell Martin with his 6th home run of the season. #BlueJays pic.twitter.com/4s3ZDDWbNl
— Andrew Hockridge (@drewhockridge) June 22, 2016
Russell Martin has blasted his early-season struggles straight into the sun. Getting his 51.1% hard-hit rate against lefties is simply delicious, and at his price and spot in the order, he's one of the top plays on the slate.