4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 5/18/16

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, we'll be focusing exclusively on the main slate starting at 7 pm Eastern. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Houston Astros

Mat Latos' first four starts for the Chicago White Sox this year brought the hot fire as he allowed only two earned runs over 24 1/3 innings. It's safe to say his peripherals have finally caught up to him as the wheels have fallen off recently, and the Houston Astros can continue that tailspin.

Latos' 5.50 SIERA is the second-worst in the entire league among all qualified starters as he struggles in all three of the most important pitching categories. Between strikeouts, walks, and ground balls, our biggest focus for an Astros opponent is the strikeouts, and Latos just hasn't gotten them this year. His 11.2% strikeout rate is dead last among all starters, and that's simply not high enough to slow down the Astros' sticks.

The last few games against right-handed pitchers, Luis Valbuena has been batting sixth for the Astros. His slash is not great, Bob, but he does still have a 36.5% hard-hit rate against righties, and that's up to 41.0% overall for the month of May. That means when he gets a hold of one, he can do this.

Luis Valbuena la despareció por segunda vez en la zafra pic.twitter.com/YhO3c8MkGi
— QualityBeisbol (@QualityBeisbol) May 15, 2016

He could very easily not be in the lineup today with Colin Moran now being on the 25-man roster, but if Valbuena gets the start, he's a quality, low-cost option.