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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 6/18/18

The Texas Rangers are in for a hot one at Kauffman Stadium, setting them up for a potential home run derby against fly-ball pitcher Ian Kennedy. Which other teams are in great stacking spots?

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. As usual, we will not include today's game at Coors Field in these recommendations. You already know that you want bats at Coors when you can afford them, and you don't need us to tell you. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Texas Rangers

The New York Mets should be very popular as an affordable lineup against Tyler Anderson at Coors Field, but if you want to look elsewhere for a stack, the Texas Rangers are an excellent alternative. We're seeing 90-degree temperatures and double-digit winds at Kauffman Stadium tonight, which is bad news for fly-ball pitcher Ian Kennedy.

Kennedy is allowing a ton of hard contact (38.6%), which when combined with a low ground-ball rate (30.1%) means lots of potential dingers. Kennedy is susceptible to batters on both sides of the plate, giving up a .366 expected weighted on-base average (xwOBA) to righties and a .380 xwOBA to lefties.

Joey Gallo ($2,900) may bat low in the order, but he's awfully enticing at this price point, holding a monstrous career 47.4% hard-hit rate and .305 isolated power (ISO) versus right-handed pitching. Fellow left-handed bats Shin-Soo Choo ($3,600) and Nomar Mazara ($3,500) can't compete with that kind of power, but against righties, they're producing a .410 and .383 xwOBA, respectively.

Rougned Odor ($2,300) is struggling this year, but he's moved up to fifth in the order the last three games, which could give him a slight boost. Odor posted a .229 ISO against righties over the last three years, so there's some pop hiding in that bat somewhere. Delino DeShields Jr. ($2,900) is another cheap option out of the two spot, and he brings major speed to the base paths (15 stolen bases). Robinson Chirinos ($2,600) is still producing a 47.8% hard-hit rate, but be wary of that 40.7% strikeout rate leading to a lot of goose eggs these days.

Adrian Beltre ($3,500) isn't hitting many dingers, but he's still a solid contributor, with a 41.8% hard-hit rate, and some nice plate discipline in a 16.8% strikeout rate and 9.0% walk rate. Elvis Andrus ($3,200) could come off the disabled list on Monday, and he would immediately deserve consideration if he's slotted back in the three-hole. He was posting some promising numbers prior to going down in April, including a .427 xwOBA and 42.0% hard-hit rate, suggesting his rise in power last year may not have been a total fluke.

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