MLB

4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 7/8/15

It's time to auto-stack the Blue Jays against a lefty, but it may require some creative strategy given their pricing.

Each day here on numberFire, we'll be providing you with four potential offenses to stack in your daily fantasy lineups. These are the offenses that provide huge run potential on that given day based on matchups and other factors.

After reading through these suggestions, make sure to check out our daily projections. These can either let you know which players to include in each stack, or which guy best complements said stack.

Another great tool is our custom optimal lineups, which are available for premium subscribers. Within the tool, we've added the option to stack teams -- you choose the team you want to stack, show how many players you want to use within the stack, and the tool will create a lineup based on this that you can then customize.

Now, let's get to the stacks. As a note, this does not include the game at Coors, but there is some crazy run potential there today. Adjust your plans accordingly. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Toronto Blue Jays

I generally stack against John Danks. I generally stack the Blue Jays when they're facing a lefty. Thank you for uniting the two and making my job easy, MLB scheduling gods.

Now, credit where credit is due: Danks did burn me his last time out by blanking the Orioles over seven innings. So he's got that going for him. It lowered his xFIP to 4.48 and increased his ground-ball percentage to 37.1 percent, which is progress, I guess. Against a team with a still-mind-boggling .372 wOBA off of lefties, though, the odds are against that happening again tonight.

If the Jays roll out the same lineup as they did last night, a wrap-around stack might not be the worst idea in the world for tourneys. The pricing makes it difficult to stack the Jays at the top of the order. However, if you snag Devon Travis and Kevin Pillar from the bottom of the order coupled with a stack at the top, you still get the benefits of stacking (doubling up on runs and RBI's) without the high cost. I would never do this in cash games (and, frankly, maybe only this one time in a tourney) because expected plate appearances and points per game are so drastically lower at the bottom of the order. However, you can capitalize on lower ownership and lower salaries by doing so in a tourney if you're feeling a little frisky.

Boston Red Sox

Because this worked so well last night (yeah, not really so much), let's try it again! Punishment is only fun in pairs, so I'm game to stack the Red Sox and accept the ramifications.

Over the past three years, Tom Koehler has posted xFIP's of 4.27, 4.48 and 4.48 respectively in games away from Marlins Park. Boston ranks sixth in the league in wOBA at home at .336 while also ranking eighth in wOBA against righties overall. On paper, it should be a match-up in which the Red Sox would have success. They just seem to buck convention on a consistent basis.

The most appealing bats in this one will be the left-handed Red Sox hitters. Although Koehler's splits have been largely similar the past two years, left-handed batters have shown a higher hard-hit rate against him over that span. That should seem to point towards David Ortiz for the second consecutive night, but, again, this team defies logic like nobody's business.

Texas Rangers

I would not fault you for a second if you were to roll out a Diamondbacks stack today instead. They have had a ton of success against left-handed pitching, Matt Harrison is making his first big-league start since spinal fusion surgery, and Paul Goldschmidt continues doing Paul Goldschmidt things. I just really love the match-up of a lefty-heavy lineup against Jeremy Hellickson.

The first 173 left-handed batters that have faced Hellickson this year are slashing .301/.372/.497 against him. This follows a season in which he did a decent job against lefties, though he did benefit from a deflated BABIP and home run to fly-ball ratio. His BABIP is super high this year, but the home run to fly-ball ratio is still below average. The takeaway here is that, yes, he struggles to get lefties out, and these struggles are sustainable. That's bad news against the Rangers.

Texas was facing a left-handed pitcher last night, so you'd assume they would have a good number of right-handed bats in the lineup. Nope. Even in that situation, they started five lefties. This means Hellickson is going to have a ton of exposure to the types of bats that have done so much damage against him this season. Especially with the more-than-reasonable pricing on Rougned Odor, Mitch Moreland and Shin-Soo Choo, I am high on the Rangers in this one.

Cleveland Indians

The Indians' offense has been pretty bad recently. Over the past 30 days, they rank 26th in the league in wOBA at just .292. This has dropped them all the way down to 20th in the league in wOBA against right-handed pitching after they had spent a majority of the first part of the season in the top 10. It came down to either the Indians or the Orioles for this slot, but Tommy Milone's effectiveness since his recall scared me off of that. So let's roll the dice that Cleveland can rebound against Dan Straily.

Straily has shown the ability to rack up the strikeouts over the past two years, but it hasn't yet translated to overall success. This has largely been because of his struggles with command where he walked 4.15 batters per nine in 52.0 big-league innings last year. The Indians rank second in the league in walk percentage against righties, meaning there should be base runners aplenty tonight for the Tribe.

If there is something positive DFS-wise about the Indians' wretched slump, it's their new, relaxed pricing. There was a stretch where both Jason Kipnis and Michael Brantley would be priced over $5,000 every night on DraftKings. Now, they're both below it, and Brantley will only run you $4,500 on the late slate. It helps make it hurt less if they fail to meet expectations, if nothing else.