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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 5/23/17

Andrew Cashner's peripheral stats don't align with his 2.45 ERA. Does that mean we should be stacking the Boston Red Sox against him tonight?

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 climb the leaderboards, and 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. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Boston Red Sox

This is a meeting of two forces where the signals don't mesh with the results. Andrew Cashner has been eluding the ills of regression for seven starts, frustrating those of us who have chosen to stack against him. The Boston Red Sox have some of the most balling peripheral stats in the league against righties, and yet they have been a below-average offense based on wRC+. If things finally mesh the way they look like they could, this puppy could explode in a big way. If not, then let the frustration continue to mount.

There are currently 107 starting pitchers who have thrown at least 40 innings this year. Among them, Cashner ranks 103rd or worse in SIERA, strikeout rate, and walk rate, and he's the only pitcher in that qualification who has more walks than strikeouts. Yet he still maintains a 2.45 ERA, which is mind-numbingly low in comparison to his 5.94 SIERA. Whatever sorcery he's used to succeed this long is admirable, but we can't get skittish about stacking against him just because of a good ERA.

The Red Sox have a lethal combo of the lowest strikeout rate in the league against righties and the fifth-highest hard-hit rate. That pairing isn't going to produce league-average offense for long. While the results are discouraging, they've given us a bit of salary relief, which we'll absolutely take on a guy like Andrew Benintendi.

Even though his slugging percentage is just .352 in the month of May, it comes with a 37.7% hard-hit rate and 45.0% fly-ball rate, both of which are better than the marks he had when he was stroking in April. He's a good embodiment of the Red Sox's struggles. All of the signs say he'll be fine, but the results haven't been there, so it's wise to plug him in while the pricing is still reasonable.

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