MLB premium

4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 4/3/18

The Astros have the day's second-highest implied total for their clash with Mike Wright. Which other teams make for good stacking options?

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.

Houston Astros

Only two pitchers are priced above $8,000 on tonight's main slate, but one of them is the all-world Clayton Kershaw. It's never easy to bypass Kershaw, especially in cash games, but if you do, you'll likely have the ability to fire in some expensive bats, so let's look to the pricier Houston Astros, who may not be a super popular stack if the masses pay up for Kershaw.

The Astros face Mike Wright, who showed some positives in his 2017 campaign, although the sample is small. In 25 MLB innings, Wright posted a 25.7% strikeout rate and 3.34 SIERA. But to throw some cold water on these marks, 2017 was Wright's best strikeout rate in any of his professional stops in which he made more than one appearance.

If we peek back to 2016, Wright threw 74 2/3 big-league innings with a 15.2% strikeout rate and a 7.9% walk rate, so it's entirely possible that last season's strikeout rate was a small-sample fluke. In addition to that, Wright allowed a hard-hit rate of 39.4% in 2017, so when guys made contact, it was good contact. Houston boasts the day's second-highest implied total (4.98), so their bats are firmly in play as a stack or one-off play.

Jose Altuve is never bad way to start off a Houston stack. He's expensive at $4,300 on FanDuel, but he's priced that way for good reason. Altuve is rocking a .476 batting average so far this year, and he posted a .952 OPS and .403 wOBA against righties in 2017.

Alex Bregman ($3,100) isn't off to the strongest of starts this campaign (.158 batting average), but he's still shown prowess against right-handed pitching in the past. Last year, he had a 33.7% hard-hit rate and 39.0% fly-ball rate in the split.

If Wright leaves any fat pitches over the plate, the switch-hitting Marwin Gonzalez ($2,600) is liable to pop another long one like he did last night.


Gonzalez posted a .230 ISO and .397 wOBA against righties last year, including a 35.1% hard-hit rate.

Josh Reddick, per usual, is a cheap way to get exposure to the Astros when they're seeing a righty. He's $2,600, had a .363 WOBA last year versus right-handers and should be in a meaty spot in the lineup.

And there's one more option -- don't sleep on Jake Marisnick, who is also priced at $2,600. He may have only two hits in 2018, but both have been home runs. Last season, among Astros with 100 or more plate appearances, Marisnick led the team in ISO against right-handed pitching with a mark of .287, so he's an intriguing inclusion if he's in the lineup.

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