3 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for Monday 6/14/21

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 hand-built 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.

Los Angeles Dodgers

The Los Angeles Dodgers own the best implied team total (5.31) outside of the San Diego Padres (6.29) in Coors Field.

Los Angeles is facing righty Spencer Howard, who boasts a non-threatening 4.74 SIERA since the start of 2020 and an even worse 5.03 xFIP in that sample, a sample that includes 177 total batters faced. Howard has generated a 23.7% strikeout rate against those hitters.

In three starts this season, Howard does have a 25.6% strikeout rate but also a 20.9% walk rate, and that all culminates in a 5.88 SIERA over those three starts.

The Dodgers aren't at full health but have some forms of salary relief in their top six, namely Gavin Lux ($2,600), who hit second last game. Will Smith ($2,700) and Chris Taylor ($3,200) should fill the five and six slots, respectively. Then we have the studs: Mookie Betts ($4,400), Justin Turner ($4,000), and Cody Bellinger ($4,000).

In relation to the MLB average in expected wOBA (.320), Taylor (.373), Smith (.369), Turner (.366), Betts (.355), and Lux (.328) all over-perform.

Kansas City Royals

Trailing only the Padres and Dodgers in implied team total are the Kansas City Royals (5.27).

Kansas City is drawing lefty Matt Boyd tonight, and though the Royals are subpar against lefties this season (a 91 wRC+), Boyd is not a particular problem, based on his own data.

Boyd has generated a 4.61 SIERA but 4.95 xFIP since the start of 2020 and has culminated just a 20.4% strikeout rate in that span, stemming from an uninspiring 11.5% swinging strike rate and a 26.8% called-strike-plus-whiff rate.

The Royals, while not a strong team against lefties overall, are likely to shift Salvador Perez ($3,000) from clean-up to third (as they typically do against lefties), meaning he'll follow righty Whit Merrifield ($3,700) and the switch-hitting Carlos Santana ($2,700). Lefty Andrew Benintendi ($3,000) should stick fourth.

Perez owns a 160 wRC+ against lefties since the start of 2020 with Santana at 140 and Merrifield at 117. We'll often want to gloss over Benintendi (64) but should get righties Jorge Soler ($2,800) and Hunter Dozier ($2,400) in the top six as well.

Milwaukee Brewers

The Milwaukee Brewers' implied total of 5.05 isn't that far off the pace of the Dodgers, and their salaries are much more palatable at the top of the lineup.

Luis Urias ($2,700), Dan Vogelbach ($2,800), Christian Yelich ($3,900), and Avisail Garcia ($2,600) should sit in the top four tonight against Vladimir Gutierrez.

Yelich has a .368 expected wOBA, and Garcia is close behind at .358. Vogelbach (.334) and Urias (.325) are closer to the MLB average (.320) yet still make for a positive stacking group based on their own merit.

Gutierrez has a 5.15 SIERA and a 5.17 xFIP in his small-sample MLB stats (71 batters faced), a three-game sample that includes single-game strikeout rates of 15.8%, 14.3%, and 22.6%. Across four minor league seasons, Gutierrez only once posted better than a 23.2% strikeout rate, and though that came in 2021, it was against just 67 batters faced.

His 8.5% swinging strike rate doesn't suggest that he has the peripherals of a high-strikeout pitcher at the next level -- at least not yet.