Stacking in MLB DFS has become an essential part of the game. We’ve covered the topic quite thoroughly in the past and due to its importance, we’re laying out situations that both behoove themselves to stacking and others that may warrant fading a potentially popular stack on a slate.
As this article is written earlier in the day, be sure to monitor both our Player News and My Lineups page to ensure that you have the most up-to-date information.
The article today is going to be focused on the games featured in the main slate, which is actually quite small. Small slates are always tough, as not only is the sampling of players available limited, but lineup overlap becomes extremely prevalent. That leaves us with a few options for tournaments: we can eat the chalk and hope to find a player or two to differentiate ourselves, identify a stack that will likely be reasonably owned but isn’t in an optimal spot, or we can go uber-contrarian and hope the high-owned options fail miserably.
While option three will generally yield the best chances of taking down a GPP on these slates, I’m just not sure any of the stacks from the teams in truly sub-optimal spots offer the upside we’re looking for, so I’m going to focus on option two – targeting a stack that will be reasonably, but not extraordinarily owned.
Stack to Target
New York Yankees – Projected Run Total: 3.9
The Yankees are popular enough that we never see them go completely under-owned, but with one of the lower-projected run totals of the slate, we’ll hopefully see their ownership low enough that we can differentiate around them enough to make a stack viable for tournaments.
Marcus Stroman is certainly a talented young pitcher that likely has a bright future ahead. But as we saw against Boston in his last outing, when things go bad, they can go bad quickly for him. As Stroman is a righty, the matchup itself sets up well for much of the projected 1-5 spots in this lineup today, with only Alex Rodriguez having a negative wOBA/ISO split (though Brett Gardner has a slightly negative wOBA split himself). In particular, Mark Teixeira has a ridiculous ISO Differential of .193 against righties, making him a strong play whether you opt to stack this team or not.
As we tend to do here at FantasyLabs, let’s turn to the Trends tool to examine this situation a bit further. Now that we’re progressing further and further into the season, we’ll begin to see our “Adv Stats – Recent” filters begin to become more and more important. As we’ve touched on before, things like Hard-Hit Differential and Exit Velocity Differential are a great way to get an idea of how a player is really hitting the ball, even if they’re getting unlucky in where they’re hitting it. And so far this season, a number of Yankees have been hitting the ball hard. Like really hard.
New York has four members of their lineup that are in the 93rd percentile or higher in terms of Hard-Hit Differential — the difference between their hard-hit percentage over the past 15 days as compared to the previous 12 months.
Additionally, three of those players have registered hard-hit percentages of 45% or higher over this period, a very solid number. When we look at players that have had both a Recent Hard-Hit Percentage of 45% or higher, combined with a Hard-Hit Differential score of at least 90%, the results have been quite positive.
It just so happens that these four players are part of the Yankees’ 1-5 lineup spots, setting up a perfect stack opportunity, either by working in Alex Rodriguez to form a traditional 1-5 stack, or mixing it up a bit with Carlos Beltran to run a 1-2, 4-6 stack to differentiate your lineup some.
Another thing to consider when building this stack though will be Brian McCann’s potential ownership. Looking at the options at catcher tonight, it’s highly likely he’ll be quite popular. If you do opt to include him, make sure that you’re finding other spots to differentiate throughout your lineup this evening.
