4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 7/31/15

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. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Pittsburgh Pirates

The Pirates' offense is one big shrug symbol. When they have great matchups, they flop. When they should get blanked, they bust out. Michael Lorenzen valiantly swoops in to erase this uncertainty with his 5.18 SIERA.

I realize some of you hate walks when it comes to stacking because they aren't extra-base hits. I get it. But a big point of stacking is to double-dip on runs scored and runs batted in, and Lorenzen will allow you to do that. He walks an absurd 14.6 percent of all left-handed batters and 11.3 percent of all righties. Lefties also have just a 29.2 percent ground-ball rate and a 32.3 percent line-drive rate, which is other-worldly awesome for DFS purposes.

I'm not opposed to using righties in this matchup, but I think the lefties deserve an extra hefty boost. Gregory Polanco is the obvious one because of his spot in the batting order, but I'm hoping to have Neil Walker and Pedro Alvarez in spots because of the extra-base upside they provide against righties.

San Francisco Giants

The Giants don't bring a bunch of pop against righties, but part of that is their park; their isolated slugging increases to .154 on the road as opposed to .117 at home. When you add in Nick Martinez you've got yourself a stack, baby.

If you can sort through the recent awful stretch, you may remember Martinez started the year with a string of starts during which his ERA below 2.00. You knew it wasn't going to last, but did the baseball deities have to pummel the young pup as they have? He has a 6.95 ERA and a 5.19 xFIP over his past eight starts, which is sub-optimal, in my opinion.

With Martinez, you really can't go wrong with either handedness of batter. He has a 4.86 xFIP against lefties and 4.97 against righties. That's dope news for Buster Posey, Hunter Pence and Matt Duffy, all of whom have posted great numbers against pitchers of the same handedness this year.

Baltimore Orioles

This one isn't as much of a slam dunk as it may appear on its face. Buck Farmer has struggled quite a bit this season, allowing 14 runs in 13.2 innings. However, he does have the ability to get a few strikeouts, and the Orioles have the third highest strikeout percentage in the league against righties. That makes me a bit uneasy. But there is enough upside here to inherit what I view as being a risk to consider.

If we look at Farmer's platoon splits for both the majors and minors, he has a below average strikeout percentage against lefties while it's above average for righties. His walk totals are a bit below average for both, though he does issue more free passes to lefties.

Because of Farmer's ability to get strikeouts, I will want to mix in a few safer options (along with the obvious Chris Davis). Manny Machado and Adam Jones both have strikeout percentages below 16.0 percent against righties, despite not possessing the platoon advantage. It'll be expensive, but pairing those two with Davis's beastliness and maybe a cheaper option could prove beneficial if Farmer doesn't find his groove thang on the mound.

Houston Astros

If you have read this column with any regularity, a) I'm so sorry, and b) you know I'm a big ol' fan of Preston Tucker. Well, he's facing Rubby de la Rosa tonight, and Rubby ain't a fan of left-handed batters. This could be a fun one.

It's a tale of two pitchers for de la Rosa's platoon stats. Against righties, he has a 2.72 xFIP matched with a 24.3 strikeout and 5.7 walk percentage. Those are seriously elite numbers against right-handed batters. Against lefties, though, dude serves up tanks like no other. And for this, we must give him thanks.

This is a stack that may be best served as a mini stack. I've been using those more often recently after reading an interesting piece by Bryan Mears at Fantasy Labs about the advantages of doing so. This is for slightly different reasoning than Bryan's article as I exclusively want to target left-handed batters, but I think it can be an effective strategy in this instance. Guys like Tucker, Luis Valbuena, Colby Rasmus and Hank Conger will most definitely have spots on my rosters, especially in tourneys.