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3 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 8/31/17

Led by slugger Giancarlo Stanton, the Miami Marlins have a great home matchup tonight against Ben Lively. Are they the top stack of the day?

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.

Miami Marlins

Okay, Giancarlo, quit playin', man.

Miami Marlins slugger Giancarlo Stanton's current run is something we haven't seen much of before. In the month of August, he's bashed his way to 18 homers on the strength of a 46.1% hard-hit rate and 48.7% fly-ball rate. He is two off slammin' Sammy Sosa's MLB record of 20 homers in a month, which Sosa set in June of 1998.


Tonight, the Marlins will face Ben Lively of the Philadelphia Phillies in Miami. In his first 53 2/3 innings pitched at the major league level, Lively has allowed 1.34 jacks per nine innings, including 4 bombs in his last start. Think we could see another one of these tonight?


There are lots of red flags as we look at Lively's profile. Over those 53 2/3 innings, he's recorded a 5.49 SIERA, 32.8% hard-hit rate and 42.5% fly-ball rate. There's reason to believe in both sides of the plate against the Phillies' starter. This year, he's allowed a .515 slugging percentage to lefties, but right-handed hitters have recorded a 31.9% hard-hit rate and 45.6% fly-ball rate.

Stanton is expensive at $5,200 and may be tough to roster, but the dude is out of his mind right now. And if we have our hearts set on Stanton, we gotta find some ways to save coin elsewhere.

Two cheap options to round out a possible Miami stack include Jacob Realmuto ($2,600) or A.J. Ellis ($2,200). Lately, we have seen the two paired together, with Realmuto manning first base and Ellis at the catcher slot, though both are listed at catcher on FanDuel.

Realmuto has hit righties well this year, logging identical 32.9% hard-hit and fly-ball rates. In August, Realmuto has been even hotter, recording a 31.3% hard-hit rate and 42.5% fly-ball rate overall. Admittedly, Ellis doesn't have a ton going for him, but he has been far better against righties than lefties this season. He's recorded a wRC+ of 90, versus a 59 wRC+ off southpaws.

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