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’ll begin 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.

There are some really big tournaments set for today’s slate of games, and to be in contention to take one of these down, we may need to think a bit outside the box with our roster construction.

I’m going to focus on only one stack today, with the mindset that we’ll dig in deeper than usual and delve into some of the data that’s available to our subscribers — if you enjoyed the free preview of MLB, make sure to subscribe here!

Stack to Target

Oakland A’s — Projected Run Total: 3.9

The A’s have under-performed as a whole this season, as evidenced by their lackluster 2.75 runs per game thus far. So why does Vegas have them projected for a semi-respectable total of 3.9 runs tonight? I believe there are a couple of reasons that may be at play here.

First, the Angels’ projected starter Hector Santiago appears to be an exploitable opponent for this team — maybe not on the surface, but just hold on a sec, I’ll get there — and second, a large portion of this lineup has simply been getting unlucky thus far. Let’s break out some of our new data from the Trends tool to illustrate.

Two statistics that have proven to be predictive of potential positive regression for hitters that may be struggling are Hard-Hit Percentage and Exit Velocity. In particular, we’re looking for players that have shown to be hitting the ball harder than their yearly average — rolling calendar year, not just this season — of late, but for one reason or another, it hasn’t resulted in the production we’d expect.

I started by constructing a trend that consisted of the Hard-Hit Differential Score filter (set to 90-100%) and the EV (Exit Velocity) Differential Score filter (also set to 90-100%) and finally I added a filter to only review results from the 2016 season. Next, I pulled up the Teams filter and reviewed how each team has performed thus far this year, sorting them by the Count option.

There are a multitude of really nice options at the top of this board, but unfortunately their hard-hitting ways are likely to be accounted for in their prices at this point because they’ve been performing so well. So not only will this have resulted in higher prices, but also what will likely be higher ownership as well — note, the Rockies and Giants are both on this list and will be facing off in Coors tonight; both are superb cash game options whether stacking or not — and if we’re focusing on some of these large-field GPPs tonight, we really need to find some value in slightly more obscure places.

Enter the A’s.

Do you know anyone clamoring to roll out an A’s stack right now? I certainly don’t. Their players have under-performed and burned anyone that has rostered them thus far. Additionally, their ballpark just isn’t one that many are generally targeting. And though the 3.9 projected runs I alluded to earlier is a positive sign for this team, it’s not necessarily at a level that people are going out of their way to target.

With that said, let’s look at who in particular has been hitting the ball hard, yet struggling from a fantasy perspective.

Coghlan likely won’t be in the starting lineup against the lefty Santiago tonight, but the others should be. In particular, Davis is a really strong target, because as we can see in the interactive widget below, he’s been brutal this year from a fantasy perspective, which should lead to incredibly low ownership.