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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 8/1/16

The Nationals get a park-factor boost, making them a high-upside stack. What other offenses should we target tonight in MLB DFS?

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

Washington Nationals

On a shorter slate like this one, we sometimes have to do what we don't normally enjoy in stacking against a high-strikeout pitcher. Archie Bradley qualifies as such. However, he also qualifies as a high-walk, high-hard-contact pitcher, so when he doesn't get that third strike, the Washington Nationals could unleash some destruction.

Bradley busted on the scene this year by striking out at least nine batters three times in a four-start span. That made him an option as a pitcher in DFS, and it certainly wasn't stack-worthy. His swinging-strike rate since then has fallen to 7.2%, increasing the impact of his 11.2% walk rate and 40.0% hard-hit rate. Even though the Washington Nationals aren't a tremendous offense against right-handed pitching, they do make hard contact, and that's a bad combo for Bradley.

We're going to give heavy preference to left-handed batters today (cross your fingers that Clint Robinson is in the lineup), but Trea Turner's performance since coming up should be turning some heads. Over a small sample of 64 plate appearances, his hard-hit rate is a whopping 40.5% with a 14.3% soft-hit rate. He's not overly safe at his price due to an increased strikeout rate, but this dude can do it both with his bat and his legs.


Even with the increased pricing, Turner's still worth a look in a park and a matchup like this.

Toronto Blue Jays

This is a conditional stack depending on who ends up starting the game for the Houston Astros.


Joe Musgrove is a tremendous, young pitcher who never walks a soul, so it might be best to avoid the Toronto Blue Jays if he makes his debut. If Doug Fister starts -- despite the new-father narrative -- you should invest in the Jays.

We had been trying to avoid stacking against Fister previously because of his ability to limit hard contact. Over his past eight starts, that ability has slipped a bit with his hard-hit rate increasing to 31.3%, amplifying the exploitability in his 15.6% strikeout rate. It seems as if our days of avoiding him may be over.

Every left-handed batter who wiggles his way into the Blue Jays' lineup needs to be high on your radar. Fister allows a 36.6% hard-hit rate to lefties while striking them out 13.9% of the time. This would obviously point to Michael Saunders, but it could also incentivize dipping lower in the order for guys like Justin Smoak or Ezequiel Carrera. This isn't to say you should avoid Josh Donaldson or Jose Bautista, but it would be wise to go out of your way to target lefties.

Seattle Mariners

With Eduardo Rodriguez's strikeouts on the rise, it'll be wise to avoid teams against him soon. His struggles have persisted, though, against righties, meaning the Seattle Mariners and their blessed platoon-conscious ways are in play.

Rodriguez has faced 168 right-handed batters thus far, striking out 15.5% with a 32.6% hard-hit rate. Even more importantly, he has held righties on the ground only 26.4% of the time, giving those right-handed sticks long-ball upside every time they make contact. The Mariners have some of those puppies who can slang it.


Ideally, Franklin Gutierrez's fly-ball rate against lefties would be higher than 25.9%. However, his 49.4% hard-hit rate means that he can turn those non-fly balls into extra-base hits, and every time he does loft it, that dog will hunt. You've got Nelson Cruz, Dae Ho Lee, and then either Chris Iannetta or Mike Zunino ripe for the picking, so dive on in with these saucy righties.

Milwaukee Brewers

The Milwaukee Brewers get a significant park-factor reduction today in bopping over to Petco Park. That's a big ding in their DFS viability, and heavy action at the trade deadline could swing things, but Jarred Cosart had big enough struggles in his time with the Miami Marlins to necessitate a stack.

In Cosart's 19 2/3 big-league innings, his SIERA was 5.65, which may actually undersell the treachery of walking 16 dudes while striking out 11. This follows a 10-start stretch in Triple-A in which he had a 6.13 FIP with a 13.4% strikeout rate and 11.2% walk rate. You can't expect a transition to San Diego to cure all of those ills, so even though the Brewers' sticks aren't ideal, they'll work on a shorter slate.

It seems unlikely -- with his contract -- that Ryan Braun ends up moving at the deadline. If he's able to come back from the injury that has kept him out the past few days, he'd be in a great spot against Cosart. Righties hold an advantage over him, and they have the higher home-run rates at Petco Park over the past three years. Braun has been yoking when he has been healthy with a 36.7% hard-hit rate the past month, meaning he could launch some dingers off of the Padres' newly-acquired righty.

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