3 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for Friday 8/20/21
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.
Colorado Rockies
Please allow me to ready my shocked face for the following.
The Colorado Rockies lead Major League Baseball in weighted on-base average (.357 wOBA) and rank third in isolated power (.206 ISO) at home this year, per FanGraphs.
Seriously, Coors Field remains easily Major League Baseball's premier hitting venue, and fresh off his no-hitter, rookie Tyler Gilbert gets his first crack at taming the beast.
Color me skeptical of Gilbert succeeding in his first start at Coors Field.
He recorded a solid-if-unspectacular 3.44 ERA in 11 appearances (10 starts) at the Triple-A level this year. However, his 5.39 expected fielding independent pitching (xFIP) is much more telling. In addition, the lefty strikes out hitters at an underwhelming clip, relying on balls in play finding gloves. That's a recipe for disaster in the Rocky Mountain thin air.
C.J. Cron ($4,200) is at the front of the line for my favorite stacking options from the Rockies. A 62-plate-appearance sample is obviously small, but his 7 homers, .435 on-base percentage, .481 ISO, .518 wOBA, and 212 weighted runs created plus (wRC+) against lefties at Coors Field are jaw-dropping marks.
Trevor Story ($4,200) and Connor Joe ($3,600) are my second- and third-favorite options on the team, respectively.
However, the entirety of Colorado's starting lineup merits stacking consideration.
Los Angeles Dodgers
Speaking of entire lineups that warrant stacking consideration, the Los Angeles Dodgers fit the bill.
They rank second in wRC+ (114) against right-handed pitchers this season. Further, their upgraded lineup ranks second in wRC+ (124) since the Major League trade deadline. They're a juggernaut offense poised to steamroll a struggling Carlos Carrasco.
The veteran righty, Carrasco, has been limited to four starts for the New York Mets due to injury. He's pitched only 11 and 1/3 innings in those turns, getting rocked for a 10.32 ERA.
In addition, he's redefining homer-prone, coughing up 5 to only 55 batters, good for 3.97 homers per nine innings. Carrasco's had no answers for lefties or righties, ceding a .569 slugging percentage and .374 wOBA to the former and a .828 slugging percentage and .531 wOBA to the latter.
Gamers have a compelling case to stack any part of this lineup.
Still, Max Muncy ($4,100), Will Smith ($3,500), and A.J. Pollock ($3,000) are among my favorites.
All three hitters have gaudy power numbers against righties this year, starting with Pollock's .226 ISO, followed by Smith's .286 ISO, and rounded out by Muncy's .302 ISO. Their power numbers dovetail perfectly with Carrasco's homer issues, creating a cathedral-high ceiling.
St. Louis Cardinals
The St. Louis Cardinals have a drool-inducing matchup against Mitch Keller tonight.
Among starters with a minimum of 60 innings pitched this year, Keller has the 2nd-highest ERA (6.86), 5th-highest xFIP (5.12), and 10th-highest skill-interactive ERA (5.06 SIERA). The best of those metrics makes him a bottom-10 starting pitcher, and the worst paints him as the second-worst pitcher. He's tailor-made for stacking against.
Further, he's lost against lefties and righties, adding to the appeal of stacking against him. To that point, he's yielded a .524 slugging percentage and .404 wOBA to lefties and a .508 slugging percentage and .381 wOBA to righties.
A bonus for stacking the Cardinals is their salary-cap-friendly salaries, which mesh nicely around a Rockies or Dodgers stack, freeing up ample salary to pony up for one of the top starting pitchers.
Lars Nootbaar ($2,100) immediately grabs my attention, just $100 above the minimum salary. The rookie lefty homered last night. He also entered Thursday with a .333 on-base percentage, a .229 ISO, and a 121 wRC+ against righties.
Tyler O'Neill ($3,000) is my second-favorite option on the team. He looks like he's made out of granite, and he's used his muscled-up frame to power up for a .219 ISO in same-handed matchups in 2021. Nolan Arenado ($4,100) wraps up my favorite piece of exposure to this stack. He has recorded a .221 ISO against righties this season.
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.
