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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 8/18/16

Jerad Eickhoff is a quality pitcher, but his struggles against lefties could be an issue tonight versus Corey Seager and the Dodgers. What other offenses should we target 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. With the split slates, we'll focus exclusively on the main slate beginning at 7 pm Eastern. Here are the teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Los Angeles Dodgers

Jerad Eickhoff is a good pitcher, so you're not going to stack against him with many teams in the league. However, he has had some pretty concerning struggles against lefties this year, and the Los Angeles Dodgers have some saucy ones who could pound him. This is just a bad matchup for the youngster.

Against right-handed batters, Eickhoff carries a stout 23.9% strikeout rate with a 4.7% walk rate. Those are the numbers of a quality starter in the league, and that's generally what Eickhoff is. But when there's a lefty at the dish, he only gets that third strike 16.6% of the time with a 6.1% walk rate. The Dodgers will likely have lefties in six of the top seven spots in the order (and the lone righty obliterates right-handed pitching in Justin Turner), putting Eickhoff in the danger zone for tonight.

The Dodgers' lineup is loaded, so Joc Pederson's depressed spot in the order makes sense, but it is still absolutely maddening. His main shortcoming last year was his strikeout rate. He has cut it this year to 24.9%, and it has come without major dips in either his hard-hit rate or his fly-ball rate. Since he returned from the disabled list in mid-July, Pederson has a 44.6% hard-hit rate and 38.9% fly-ball rate. If he were to wiggle his way higher in the order, he'd be an auto-roster guy, but he's still a tournament option as things stand now.

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