Baseball Picks Daily Fantasy Expert Advice
Daily Fantasy MLB Hitter Stacks for FanDuel and DraftKings- 5/12/16
Welcome to our new daily article breaking down some of the other stacking targets on this slate. We covered our system's top value plays in our daily picks article and our updates articles but here we will look at other dudes to consider.
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Stacking in DFS MLB is such an important concept if you’re looking to take down a big tournament on FanDuel or DraftKings. It’s also a good way to diversify cash games because the variance in baseball can mean wild swings (ahem) in the scoring on a particular slate. The concept is easy. You want to pile players from one or two teams into your lineups because those guys compound scores by helping each other score runs when the going is good.
Stack Targets
Baltimore Orioles vs. Mike Pelfrey(Detroit)
This is far and away the best stacking option of the night. We've got the team with the second highest slugging % and OPS against right-handed pitching going up against a guy who's allowing lefties to hit over .400, has an xFIP of over 5.00 and has as many walks as strikeouts on the season. Did I mention the game is in Baltimore, one of the more hitter friendly parks in baseball? Talk about a recipe for disaster (at least for Pelfrey that is). Because of the splits, I would go ahead and plug Matt Wieters and Chris Davis into your lineups to take advantage of Pelfrey's inability to get left-handed hitters out (you can go Alvarez over Davis if he gets a start, but I personally like Davis more). From there you can really go a number of different ways as our system really likes Jonathan Schoop, Manny Machado, and Adam Jones quite a bit. If you can afford it, I'd personally pay up for Machado and Jones, both of whom have reverse splits against right-handed pitchers, and because between the two of them they have hit all of their home runs off of right-handed pitching. Like I said before this is clearly the best stacking option on the board tonight, and even if you aren't trying to stack you need to get some of these guys into your lineup.
St.Louis Cardinals vs. Jered Weaver(Angels)
Things get slightly more dicey after the Orioles, but I think the Cardinals have a good chance to have a big game against Jered Weaver and the Angels. I know St. Louis hasn't exactly been on fire this season, but to my surprise they have the highest slugging % and the third highest OPS against right-handed pitching on the season. Their offense has begun to pick up some steam recently as they've scored 5 or more runs in each of their past 4 games. Now let's talk about the pitcher. Jered Weaver has been less than serviceable this season, sporting an xFIP of 5.49, a softly-hit ball % of just 13.2% (one of the lowest I've ever seen), and absurdly enough has actually allowed more line drives than ground balls to be hit against him (again, pretty much completely unheard of). To take advantage of this pitching matchup, I'd play Moss or Adams (either is good, but Adams has a very depressed price tag), Carpenter, Diaz (who's hitting an absurd .394 and has an OPS of 1.133 against righties this season), and Hazelbaker. This isn't necessarily a slam dunk as far as stacking goes, but I do think St.Louis is going to put up some runs tonight so this makes a nice, low ownership tournament stack.
Detroit Tigers vs. Ubaldo Jimenez(Orioles)
Returning to Baltimore, our projection system likes a stack against the Orioles right-hander (and while I don't love it, there is definitely some high upside here). Jimenez has actually been better than his ERA and win totals suggest, as he has an xFIP of under 4 on the season, and has a respectable K/9 ratio of just under 9. He's been significantly worse against left-handed pitching on the season but struggles enough against righties to at least garner a mention here. If you want to roll out a Detroit stack, our system likes Victor Martinez, Miguel Cabrera, Justin Upton and either Nick Castellanos or Jose Iglesias. This is definitely not a safe stack by any stretch of the imagination, but I could see it paired with a Baltimore stack to take advantage of the ballpark and somewhat suspect pitching of both teams.
Note: Because this is such a short slate that has a lot of great pitchers going, I don't really love any of the other stacks, but our projection system seems to like stacking left-handed hitting Yankees against Ian Kennedy, but I personally don't love it.
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image sources
- 1024px-Manny_Machado_(17140631152): By Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA (Manny Machado) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons