MLB premium

4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 5/18/17

Even with the injury bug plaguing the Seattle Mariners, are they the top team to stack on Thursday's main slate?

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 beginning at 7:35 pm Eastern. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Seattle Mariners

Yes, injuries have taken a toll both on the Seattle Mariners' pitching and their sticks. And yes, it's a park that favors pitchers. But even a stripped-down Mariners team has some dudes who can bang, and that may be enough against Dylan Covey.

Covey's situation is insanely difficult. He's a Rule-5 pick, meaning the Chicago White Sox essentially have to keep him on the 25-man roster in order to retain him. That forces them to trot him out there every fifth day when he could likely use more seasoning in the minors. He did have arguably his best start of the year his last time out, striking out 9 San Diego Padres batters in 4 1/3 innings. The Padres, though, rank 23rd in wRC+ against righties; the Mariners are fifth. Even when you account for the losses of Robinson Cano and Mitch Haniger, this is another tough task for Covey.

The big allure in the Mariners is -- by a wide margin -- the hair on Ben Gamel and Taylor Motter.


Don't bother trying to compete with that elite asset they're bringing to the table.

A close second, though, is how well those two guys are striking the ball at the dish. Check out their batted-ball numbers against righties for the season.

Versus RHP in 2017 Hard-Hit Rate Fly-Ball Rate
Ben Gamel 40.0% 43.2%
Taylor Motter 44.8% 43.1%


You can get those two ball-bashing, hair-flipping dudes on your roster for less than $3,100 apiece on FanDuel while facing Covey. The pitching on the slate should also allow you to snag the ever-Gucci Kyle Seager and Nelson Cruz, so even a depleted Mariners roster is worthy of your attention.

To read all premium content, upgrade to a Premium account with numberFire

If you're not a Premium subscriber, it takes just a few seconds to sign up. You'll get access to all of our insider information, game projections, handicapping advice, DFS tools, advanced statistics, and more.

Log In Go Premium