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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 5/19/16

The Cleveland Indians have exploited a wretched Cincinnati Reds bullpen the past three games, and they're in a quality spot again on Thursday.

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. There are split slates, but we'll be focusing exclusively on the main slate starting at 7 pm Eastern. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Cleveland Indians

At some point, we're going to have to start stacking against the Cincinnati Reds regardless of who is starting for them. With a bullpen ERA of 6.43 and a SIERA of 4.57, unless the starter goes the full nine innings, the opponent is going to tack on some runs at the end. This brings us back to the Cleveland Indians again.

A bit of an added bonus here is that Tim Adleman has struggled with his control, making him a quality stacking target. His first three starts have included matchups against the Philadelphia Phillies and the Milwaukee Brewers, both of whom have strikeout rates that are well above average against righties. As such, his 19.4% strikeout rate may not be totally legit, and that would amplify concerns around his 10.5% walk rate and the tremendous park factor at Great American Ballpark.

Carlos Santana was out of the lineup yesterday with the Indians in a National League park, but with a right-handed pitcher toeing the rubber, he figures to be back in there today. He doesn't seem to be the most exciting selection for a mid-priced first baseman, but his 39.2% hard-hit rate against righties is top-notch. He adds to that a 54.4% fly-ball rate that will play well in this park, allowing him to do saucy things like this.

That seems pretty exciting to me. At this price and matchup, Santana makes a Cleveland stack easy to fit with quality upside.

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