4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 4/23/15
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. I'm not going to include the Padres and Rockies at Coors Field in here because y'all are smart enough to know that you should stack them if you can afford it. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.
Toronto Blue Jays
If it seems like a common refrain to stack one of the teams in the series between the Blue Jays and the Orioles, that's because it is. The Jays have popped 21 home runs this year while the O's are at 20. Both should add to their totals today.
Chris Tillman's 2015 stats are inflated by one outing in which he allowed seven runs over 2.2 innings. That outing came against these same Blue Jays. Eighteen batters faced is not near enough off of which to make a stacking decision, but his fly-ball tendencies in the Rogers Centre against this team are asking for disaster.
If you're playing just the late slate on DraftKings, you'll have to pay up for Toronto hitters. Four of the 10 highest-priced position players are all Blue Jays. However, you've still got guys like Dalton Pompey and Devon Travis swimming below $4,000, so you can make this stack work.
Los Angeles Dodgers
Ryan Vogelsong has started one game this year. It went well! He allowed seven runs through 4.2 innings while walking four and striking out five. Overall, his strikeout-to-walk ratio is at 10 to 9 for the season. Start number two can't possibly go poorly!
In addition to Vogelsong's struggles, the Dodgers' offense is straight-up cooking right now. They have scored at least five runs in seven of their past nine games, and they entered play last night with the top wOBA in the league. AT&T Park carries a negative park factor, but it was actually ranked higher than Dodger Stadium last year. Home runs shouldn't be expected, but the Dodgers should still cross home plate plenty in this one.
Even with their offensive prowess, the pricing on the Dodgers is still fair (most likely because of the aforementioned park factor). On the DraftKings early slate, only Yasiel Puig and Adrian Gonzalez are priced above $4,400. You can make a quality stack in a plus match-up without blowing your budget. I'm down with this bidniss.
Cincinnati Reds
Kyle Lohse has not had a good start to the season. Through three starts, he has a 10.34 ERA and has allowed at least four earned runs and six hits in each outing. The good news for him is that this is unsustainable in almost every way (high BABIP against, extremely low strand percentage, and a grotesque home run to fly ball ratio), but he still looks like a prime point producer today.
According to PITCHf/x data, Lohse's average sinker velocity was exactly 89.4 every year for each of the past three years and between 89.3 and 89.8 miles per hour every year from 2009 to 2014. This year, however, that has dipped to 88.9, a drop of half a mile-per-hour in just a year. Lohse is 36, so that shouldn't be entirely shocking, but it is probably not going to end well if it keeps up.
The problem with this stack is that the Reds haven't exactly been scalding the ball out of the gate. They only have three players that currently have a wOBA greater than .315. Among those three, though, is Joey Votto da gawd. He went 2 for 4 last night with a .444 wOBA, and it brought his season-long wOBA down to .528 from .533. Gross. If you can find some pieces to slap around him, this could be a decent combo for the early slate.
Miami Marlins
Among early-slate games, the highest over/unders outside of Coors are in the Milwaukee-Cincinnati game and this one between Miami and Philadelphia at 8.5. If you wanted to get a little weird with it, I could totally see a Phillies stack in a tourney. I'd just rather play it safe and stack against Dustin McGowan in cash games.
Last year with the Blue Jays, McGowan was inserted into the rotation to make eight starts. In those eight starts, he had a 5.08 ERA while opposing hitters had a .291/.371/.475 slash with a .374 wOBA. His ground-ball rate decreased to 36.4 percent from 40.7 while his strikeout to walk ratio slipped to 1.47 from 2.25. The experiment could have gone better.
This probably means that McGowan won't last long, requiring a peek at the Phillies' bullpen. They really haven't been too bad this year with a 2.45 ERA. However, they have walked 5.52 batters per nine innings, resulting in a 3.60 FIP. Once you control for their 4.3 home run to fly ball ratio, their xFIP leaps to 4.44. They're not the Kansas City Royals. This makes me feel pretty confident, even in a Marlins offense that has largely failed to live up to expectations this year.
