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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 6/1/17

The Boston Red Sox have some value sticks we can target as they face lefty Wade Miley tonight. Is that enough to make them the top stack on the board?

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

Boston Red Sox

Early in the season, Wade Miley was spinning some devil magic out on the mound. Despite walking a grotesque number of batters, he finished the month of April with a 2.32 ERA and 29.7% strikeout rate. Even then, there were signs that tougher times were ahead for Miley, and those signals largely came to fruition in the month of May.

Miley's strikeout success came despite an inability to generate many whiffs, a key to knowing whether or not a player's strikeout rate is sustainable. In April, Miley's swinging-strike rate was just 9.6%, well below where you'd think for a guy getting as many third strikes as he was. If the strikeouts fell away, then his walk rate and hard-hit rate would make him a great stacking candidate for DFS.

That's exactly what happened in May. He finished that month with just a 12.0% strikeout rate and 11.1% walk rate, helping him post a 4.90 SIERA. Although Miley gets ground balls, many of them are well struck with his hard-hit rate up at 37.3% for the season. Without the strikeouts falling in his favor, Miley has become the ideal target for DFS, and that all gets amped up when he's facing a team as good as the Boston Red Sox.

Whenever there's a lefty on the bump, it's wise to squeeze Chris Young into your lineups. He's $2,400 on FanDuel, and he sends southpaws into orbit. The questions we'll have today with the Red Sox center around Josh Rutledge and Sam Travis. Rutledge hit second against a lefty on Tuesday, but his track record isn't one of a guy with a lot of power. That said, he's $2,600 and should hit high in the order, so maybe we'll be willing to accept his .156 career isolated slugging against lefties and use him to gain extra flexibility.

Travis is a bit different. He's in the big leagues exclusively to bang left-handed pitching, but he's also at risk of a pinch hitter once Miley leaves the game. Mitch Moreland is one of the better defensive first basemen in the league, and he's the more desirable bat against non-lefties. For that reason, we should try to pay up for a different stick at first if possible. Travis has left for a pinch hitter in all three of his starts this year, making his upside lower and his floor non-existent. Even though he's a potential bargain bat in a good lineup, this may be a situation where we can feel all right with taking a pass.

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