MLB

4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 4/11/16

The Boston Red Sox square off with Yovani Gallardo at Fenway Park Monday, meaning Mookie Betts should be squarely in your crosshairs.

Stacking can be a controversial topic in many daily fantasy sports, but you can count baseball as a glaring exception. Here, it's universal.

Using multiple players on the same team on a given day presents you with the opportunity to double dip. If one of your players hits an RBI double, there's a good chance he drove in another one of your guys. When you get the points for both the run and the RBI, you'll be climbing the leaderboards fast.

Each day here on numberFire, we'll go through four offenses ripe for the stacking. They could have a great matchup, be in a great park, or just have a lot of quality sticks in the lineup, but these are the offenses primed for big days that you may want a piece of.

Premium members can use our new stacking feature to customize their stacks within their optimal lineups for the day, choosing the team you want to stack and how many players you want to include. You can also check out our hitting heat map, which provides an illustration of which offenses have the best combination of matchup and potency.

Now, let's get to the stacks. With today's split slate, we'll be slicing the stacks in half. The top two teams will be on the early slate of games with the bottom two on the late slate. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Detroit Tigers

This is one of two games on the day with an over/under of nine, and it's not hard to see why. The Detroit Tigers obliterate left-handed pitching, and they get a crack at one of those bad boys today. Giddy up.

Betting against Pirates pitching coach Ray Searage is usually not a fruitful endeavor, but he'll get a big test in his progress with Jonathon Niese today. Niese struck out seven and walked only one in his team debut, though it's hard to see those rates being sustainable after a 14.7% strikeout rate and 7.1% walk rate last year. The Tigers had a 120 wRC+ against lefties last year, and the addition of Justin Upton should only help. They could end up being this year's Toronto Blue Jays.

Batting in front of a load of dudes who destroy lefties can really jack up the value of Ian Kinsler. Kinsler doesn't individually scald the ball against lefties -- he had a 30.9% hard-hit rate versus them last year -- but he does get on base. He fanned only 6.4% of the time against them last year while posting an equal walk total. If he gets on base, the odds are high he'll be able to come around to score. He's not particularly cheap, but Kinsler should be high on your list for the early slate.

Boston Red Sox

The Boston Red Sox were always a team to target at home last year, posting a .340 wOBA. When you put that nastiness up against Baltimore Orioles starter Yovani Gallardo, good things could be on tap.

Gallardo started to see a downturn last year with the Texas Rangers as his ground-ball rate decreased, amplifying the issues with his 15.3% strikeout rate. He also saw his walk rate rise to 8.6%. That duo is going to lead to a boatload of base runners, and the Red Sox have the arsenal to take advantage.

Gallardo's average fastball velocity in his first start this season dipped all the way to 87.7 miles per hour, down from 90.4 miles per hour last year. That led to increased usage of his slider, a pitch he used 32.6% of the time. That's music to the ears of Mookie Betts, who had the best mark of all qualified batters last year against sliders. Ya dig? Ya should.

Houston Astros

Just like we target the Red Sox at home, we target the Houston Astros against low-strikeout pitchers. Kansas City Royals starter Chris Young is unendingly frustrating to stack against because of the stout defense behind him, but we may as well give it a whirl again.

Young had a 16.6% strikeout rate with an 8.6% walk rate last year, meaning he allows base runners, and his 25.5% ground-ball rate means those mistakes can come with big ramifications. The Astros led the league in fly-ball rate last year and were second in dingers, so this stack comes with ginormous upside.

It's hard to pay up for pitching and get in some of the top stacks for the late slate, but Luis Valbuena gives you a bit of flexibility in that pursuit. He's only $2,300 on FanDuel and $3,600 on DraftKings, but his 36.2% hard-hit rate and 45.1% fly-ball rate meet the marks we're looking for in a high-upside player. His spot in the batting order can be a concern, but if you're rolling out the Astros in a tourney lineup, Valbuena should be included.

Washington Nationals

If you're still licking your wounds from last week when Atlanta Braves starter Bud Norris kept the Washington Nationals in check, you're not alone. Use that to your advantage and go back to the Nats today, hopefully at lower ownership.

The reason we were so jacked about this last time around was Norris' 4.64 SIERA in 2015 before the Orioles shipped him to the bullpen. It's not as if he was dominant against the Nationals, striking out four and walking two over seven innings; it just didn't lead to a bunch of runs. Now that they're in a better park (Nationals Park ranks 10th in three-year average park factor), it's time to give it another crack.

This is a spot where you may need to get creative with your stacking. With a starter as studly as the Nats' Max Scherzer on the slate, it's not going to be easy to afford Bryce Harper. However, the other guys near the top of the order (Michael Taylor, Anthony Rendon, and Ryan Zimmerman) are all relatively cheap options. Even if Harper goes off, you can still benefit from his Gucciness by using those guys as they score runs and drive them in. It may not be a terrible idea to trot out a Nats stack without Harper if it allows you to also snag Scherzer, and that may be the only option on a slate like this.