3 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 4/7/21

Stacks are the backbone of cashing daily fantasy baseball lineups. Correlation drives upside, creating the potential to place high or even win GPPs when your selected stacks explode offensively.

This column will do the digging and the dirty work to determine which stacks are worth rostering each day. Scoring upside will fuel the stacks that get the nod. Sometimes that will lead to chalky selections, but contrarian stacks will get their fair share of love too.

In addition to utilizing the touted daily stacks in handbuilt lineups, numberFire premium members can throw these highlighted stacks into an optimized lineup using our DFS Sharpstack tool. Our hitting heat map tool is also available to premium members looking for more stacking options. It provides valuable info such as implied total, park factors, and stats for identifying the quality of the opposing pitcher.

Let's take a look at the top stacks on today's main slate.

Toronto Blue Jays

The Toronto Blue Jays have a dandy of a draw against below-average righty Kyle Gibson. The veteran right-handed pitcher is responsible for the third-highest ERA (5.35) and skill-interactive ERA (4.77 SIERA) in 2020 among today's probable pitchers. He did nothing in his first start to suggest a turnaround is imminent. On the contrary, after getting staked to a five-run lead on Opening Day, he promptly vomited all over his cleats and gave the lead back. Gibson surrendered 5 runs on 4 hits, 3 walks, and 1 strikeout in only 1/3 of an inning pitched. Woof.

Gibson's nearly equally giving to left-handed batters and righties. According to FanGraphs, since 2019, he's yielded a .350 weighted on-base average (wOBA) to right-handed batters and a .363 wOBA to lefties. When Gibson ultimately turns the game over to the bullpen, don't expect Toronto's offense to skip a beat. The Texas Rangers have the second-highest bullpen ERA (8.61) in the early going. Small sample aside, their bullpen is no great shakes on paper, either.

Table-setters Marcus Semien ($3,300) and Cavan Biggio ($3,100) are fine options at the top of the order. My favorite stacking options start from the three-hole, though, with Tuesday's two-homer star, Bo Bichette ($3,200). The young shortstop has been excellent in same-handed matchups in his big-league career, ripping a .226 isolated power (ISO) and 119 weighted runs created plus (wRC+).

Teoscar Hernandez ($3,400) calls the cleanup spot home, and his .237 ISO against righties since 2018 plays well in a Blue Jays stack. Don't look now, but Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s ($3,300) launch angle is up in the early going. He can really put a charge into the ball, and lifting it in the air was the missing piece from his batted-ball profile. He's already hit a homer this year, and more could be on the horizon as early as today.

I'm honed in two more players, Lourdes Gurriel ($2,500) and Rowdy Tellez ($2,300). Out of 307 hitters with a minimum of 600 plate appearances since 2018, Gurriel ranks 39th in FanGraphs' pitch value metric against changeups and 41st against sliders, Gibson's two secondary offerings. Tellez is strictly a cheap tater-chasing option with a .249 ISO against righties since reaching The Show in 2018.

Minnesota Twins

As bad as Gibson was last year, Matt Boyd was worse, with a slate-high 6.71 ERA in 2020. Homers were a major issue for Boyd. He coughed up 2.24 homers per nine innings. Boyd's no stranger to surrendering gopher-balls, as his 1.98 homers per nine innings since 2019 is the highest mark among pitchers with a minimum of 150 innings pitched.

The top sluggers on the Minnesota Twins should be salivating at the thought of stepping into the batter's box against him. Not coincidentally, my stacking interest from the Twins' lineup is centered on a trio of power hitters. Specifically, three right-handed hitters can take advantage of the .608 slugging percentage and .410 wOBA Boyd's ceded to 232 righties faced since 2019.

It starts with arguably the game's premier lefty-masher, Nelson Cruz ($4,000). After eliminating a couple of qualified hitters who've earned qualified-hitter status this year, Cruz ranks fourth in on-base percentage (.423) against lefties since 2018 and first in wRC+ (189) and ISO (.380). He's a no-doubt pick.

Byron Buxton ($3,700) is another home-run threat. He's sitting on a .202 ISO against lefties since 2018, and he's putting his offseason bulking up to good use thus far in 2021. Miguel Sano ($3,000) is the last member of the Twins who gets my stamp of approval for stacking. Sano led the way in fly-ball and line-drive exit velocity among qualified hitters last year, at 101.3 miles per hour, per Baseball Savant. He's put his elite raw power to good use against lefties, recording a robust .271 ISO against them since 2018.

Stacking all three of Cruz, Buxton and Sano account for substantial cap space, but they can be blended with a handful of the aforementioned Blue Jays while leaving enough space to roster the top pitcher on the slate, Shane Bieber. That's the lineup-building strategy I'm deploying today.

Boston Red Sox

I'm primarily stacking the first two stacks, but the Boston Red Sox merit stacking attention, too. They're listed as -126 favorites in a home game with a total of nine runs at FanDuel Sportsbook. The betting line supports stacking them, as does playing at Fenway Park. According to the three-year park factors used at FantasyPros, Fenway Park has the third-highest park factor for runs (1.103) and the highest for doubles (1.404).

Opposing starter Ryan Yarbrough doesn't have the type of ugly numbers that are obvious for stacking against like Gibson and Boyd. However, his batted-ball profile and low-strikeout percentage could cause him problems at Fenway Park. I'm not typically a fan of looking at pitcher splits by ballpark due to a lot of noise in the numbers, but Yarbrough's 4.44 ERA in six games spanning 24 and 1/3 innings at Fenway Park, per Yahoo! Sports, doesn't dissuade me from touting stacking the Red Sox.

The headliner of this stack is J.D. Martinez ($3,600). Since 2018, he has a .417 on-base percentage, .341 ISO, and 182 wRC+ against lefties. Xander Bogaerts ($3,300) is the second fiddle in the stack, totaling a .380 on-base percentage, .209 ISO, and 131 wRC+ against southpaws since 2018. Others who warrant consideration include Enrique Hernandez ($2,800), Alex Verdugo ($2,800), Hunter Renfroe ($2,600), Christian Vazquez ($2,400), and Bobby Dalbec ($2,300).

Third baseman Rafael Devers' ($3,000) absence isn't an oversight; he's awful against lefties. Fade him.

Joshua Shepardson is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Joshua Shepardson also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username bchad50. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his/her personal views, he/she may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his/her personal account. The views expressed in his/her articles are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.