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3 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 9/1/16

On a small slate, the Chicago Cubs are one of the top stacking options. What other offenses should we target?

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 a condensed slate of just three games on the main slate, we will take a look at three stacks that you should be targeting today.

Chicago Cubs

The Chicago Cubs are favored today (-155 moneyline) as they face Jeff Samardzija and the San Francisco Giants. Samardzija is in the midst of his fifth full season as a starter, and he has taken a few steps back with arguably the worst season of his career. Samardzija's career high 4.34 SIERA is being largely driven by a three-year high in walk rate at 8.1%, and his second-lowest strikeout rate at 18.3%. Combined with the lowest swinging-strike rate of his career at 9.0%, and there's red flags everywhere as he enters a matchup with the Cubs.

Keep in mind lefties have done the most damage against Samardzija in 2016, as illustrated below:

Handedness Strikeout Rate Slugging Percentage Weighted On Base Average xFIP
Left 16.0% 0.476 0.336 4.74
Right 20.4% 0.386 0.285 3.81


With all of the success the Cubs offense has against right-handed pitching (fifth best in the league in wOBA at .329) and Samardzja's struggles against lefties, Miguel Montero may be the right fit.


While Montero has seen his playing time sliced with the emergence of Willson Contreras, his lower price point may allow you some additional lefty exposure to Samardzija in order to fit in Anthony Rizzo and Dexter Fowler.

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