4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 7/30/18

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.

Cleveland Indians

In 2017, Ervin Santana was fantastic, at least by traditional metrics, as he pitched to a 16-8 record and 3.28 ERA en route to an All-Star appearance. However, he ended the year with a 4.60 SIERA and 19.3% strikeout rate while allowing a 42.5% fly-ball rate. In other words, he wasn't nearly as good as his 3.28 ERA would have you believe.

It's been only one start, but so far in 2018, it's been much of the same for the veteran starter.

Following offseason finger surgery in February and a setback in May, Santana didn't make his debut until July 25. In that one start, Santana allowed seven hits and three runs along with five strikeouts and a walk over five innings of work. It's only one game, but Santana gave up a 37.5% hard-hit rate and a whopping 50.0% fly-ball rate. And that fly-ball rate isn't far from what he did in his two starts at Triple-A (51.6%) or his mark from 2017, which tells us that there's something there to exploit.

As a team, the Cleveland Indians carry a 4.96 implied total. There's only one team projected at five or more runs on what could be a low-scoring night, so we should be targeting the Tribe. But over the last three calendar years, Santana's 4.72 xFIP against lefties is a whole run above his 3.60 ERA in the split. Naturally, we'll build around left-handed swingers here.

We can't start anywhere but with the dynamic, switch-hitting duo of Jose Ramirez ($4,700) and Francisco Lindor ($4,600). Ramirez is hitless for his last seven games, however, a .440 weighted on-base average (wOBA) and .357 isolated power (ISO) against righties keeps him at the top of our list. As for Lindor, he owns 42.5% hard-hit rate and 42.6% fly-ball rate in the split, which he's turned into 22 homers and a .292 ISO in 2018.

Michael Brantley ($3,300) and Yonder Alonso ($3,200) should also hit within the top five batters this evening. While Brantley's destroyed right-handed pitching to the tune of a .377 wOBA, 44.8% hard-hit rate and 8.2% strikeout rate, Alonso is less of a sure thing, with a 19.3% strikeout rate against righties, but the upside comes in the form of a .213 ISO and 39.5% hard-hit rate.

When you're looking to round out your Cleveland stack, Melky Cabrera ($2,200) projects to bat sixth from the left side. Cabrera hasn't displayed much pop in 2018, but he has a respectable .324 wOBA and tidy 10.5% strikeout rate against righties over the last three calendar years. And for those who like to look to batter-versus-pitcher history, Cabrera's killed Santana, sporting a .380 on-base percentage in 46 career at-bats.