MLB

4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 4/6/16

Jim Sannes  —  @JimSannes Apr 6th, 2016
Runs have been flowing at Chase Field this year, and the Arizona Diamondbacks have a matchup that could allow that trend to continue Wednesday.

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. With the split slates today, we'll get you two stacks from each. The top two teams below are playing early and available either on early or all-day slates. The bottom two teams are starting late and ready to rack up the runs. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Arizona Diamondbacks

Through the first two games at Chase Field this year, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies have combined to score 32 runs. 


We're going to cross our fingers and hope the Diamondbacks add to that total today.

Righty Tyler Chatwood will get the start for the Rockies, his first in the big leagues since 2014. In his career as a starter, he has only a 13.5% strikeout rate and a 10.4% walk rate. When you're allowing that many base runners in a place that ranks fifth in three-year average park factor, things are likely to go poor quickly. The Diamondbacks are a team that can take advantage.

Chatwood has an xFIP above 4.00 against righties, giving you flexibility to use guys like Paul Goldschmidt, but if Socrates Brito is hitting second again, he should be on your radar. His strikeout rate in 2015 (between Double-A and the majors) against righties was only 16.0%, meaning he's going to put balls in play. When you've got Goldschmidt and David Peralta following you, that's going to lead to runs. At his price ($2,200 on FanDuel and $3,200 on DraftKings), you could do a whole lot worse.

Seattle Mariners

It's not often that you see an over/under hit 9.5 this early in the season unless the game is at Coors Field. That's what we've got today with the Texas Rangers' Colby Lewis facing the Seattle Mariners. Giddy up.

If Lewis were allowed to face only right-handed batters, things might be okay. He has an average strikeout rate and a low walk rate against them, helping make up for his low ground-ball rate. Unfortunately for him, his strikeout rate falls all the way to 13.4% against lefties, and the Mariners are gluttonous with left-handed bats.

Robinson Cano's hot start basically means you'll have to bite the bullet on his ownership if you want a piece of the M's. Kyle Seager will also be an abundantly popular play, though not as much as Cano, and that's where we jump. Seager hit .295/.346/.530 on the road last season and finished the year with just a 10.8% soft-hit rate against righties. If he weren't playing in Seattle, he'd be more than just an All-Star, and it's best to pounce when he has matchups like this.

Washington Nationals

Bud Norris is getting a chance to start again with the Atlanta Braves after a tough 2015 that saw the Baltimore Orioles jettison him to the bullpen. His welcome home gift to the rotation is a date with Bryce Harper and the Washington Nationals. 


Maybe the bullpen isn't so bad?

Norris' demotion came after his first 11 starts of the year resulted in just a 15.4% strikeout rate to go with his 42.6% ground-ball rate. The advantage of targeting Norris is that his strikeout rate actually is even lower against righties, allowing you to use guys like Anthony Rendon and Ryan Zimmerman in addition to Harper.

Something to keep an eye on here is the Nats' leadoff spot. Ben Revere had to leave the team's season opener with an injury, giving way to Michael Taylor. Taylor struggled with strikeouts in his rookie season, but he did make decent contact with a 31.1% hard-hit rate. If he's in the leadoff spot, I wouldn't hesitate to plug him in and pray the volume overcomes the strikeout issues.

Minnesota Twins

Did the Minnesota Twins burn you on Monday? Me, too! Awesome! Let's do it again for old time's sake because it was so much fun the first time.

This is much less about the Twins than it is about Baltimore Orioles starter Yovani Gallardo. His strikeout rate fell down to 15.3% in 2015, its fourth consecutive season in decline. Couple that with his 8.6% walk rate, and you wind up with a 4.59 SIERA. It's hard to have success anywhere with a mark like that, but when you're pitching at Camden Yards, things could get gross in a hurry.

Gallardo didn't have dramatic platoon splits last year with the Texas Rangers, sporting a 14.6% strikeout rate against lefties and 15.9% against righties. This means the Twins' big right-handed bats are in play, and so is lefty Eddie Rosario. Opponents made contact on 84.5% of their swings last year against Gallardo, the eighth-highest mark in the league. Rosario never saw a bad pitch he didn't like, but if Gallardo can't generate swings and misses, that may play right into Rosario's hands.