3 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for Thursday 5/13/21

Stacks are the backbone of cashing daily fantasy baseball lineups. Correlation drives upside, creating the potential to place high or even win GPPs when your selected stacks explode offensively.

This column will do the digging and the dirty work to determine which stacks are worth rostering each day. Scoring upside will fuel the stacks that get the nod. Sometimes that will lead to chalky selections, but contrarian stacks will get their fair share of love too.

In addition to utilizing the touted daily stacks in handbuilt lineups, numberFire premium members can throw these highlighted stacks into an optimized lineup using our DFS Sharpstack tool. Our hitting heat map tool is also available to premium members looking for more stacking options. It provides valuable info such as implied total, park factors, and stats for identifying the quality of the opposing pitcher.

Let's take a look at the top stacks on today's main slate.

Cincinnati Reds

The Cincinnati Reds are visiting Coors Field tonight, and that's an exciting prospect for Cincinnati's hitters. According to the park factors at FantasyPros, Coors Field leads the way in park factor for runs (1.362), singles (1.230), and triples (2.177), and it ranks second for homers (1.257) and doubles (1.345). That's a dreamy starting point for using a stack, but it gets better!

A matchup with Chi Chi Gonzalez is a plus for an offensive outburst. The 29-year-old righty has the second-highest ERA (5.97) and highest skill-interactive ERA (5.33 SIERA) on the slate. As bad as his full-season total are, his 7.23 ERA over the last 30 days is even more worthy of stacking against.

Gonzalez is bad against righties and lefties alike. He's ceded a .330 weighted on-base average (wOBA) to righties since last year, and lefties have teed off for a .401 wOBA. Also, according to Baseball Savant, he's responsible for a scintillating .406 expected wOBA (xwOBA).

Given Gonzalez's struggles against all hitters, the entire Reds lineup is stackable. Still, his more significant struggles against lefties coupled with the platoon advantage they'll have against him thrust a couple of Cincinnati's hitters to the top of my preferred stacking heap. The apple of my eye is Jesse Winker ($4,500). Since 2018, he's torched righties for a .400 on-base percentage, .232 isolated power (ISO), and 146 weighted runs created plus (wRC+).

Mike Moustakas ($3,500) is my second favorite option. He's tallied a .247 ISO and 111 wRC+ against righties since 2018. Tyler Naquin ($3,400) is yet another left-handed-hitting option. He's having a surprisingly good season, smacking eight homers with a .345 on-base percentage, .281 ISO, and 136 wRC+.

The top right-handed-hitting options include Nick Senzel ($3,000) if he remains penciled in atop the lineup, along with Nick Castellanos ($4,400) and Eugenio Suarez ($3,700).

New York Yankees

Last night, the New York Yankees faced a right-handed opener, Collin McHugh, followed by a left-handed bulk reliever, Ryan Yarbrough. They mustered only one run against the Tampa Bay Rays, but they'll have another chance against a southpaw tonight, facing Rich Hill.

When the Bronx Bombers oppose a lefty, I'm likely to tout them as a stack. Tonight's no exception. They demolish southpaws, and chasing ceiling is the name of the game with stacks.

Speaking to their excellence against southpaws, three hitters have a wRC+ of 155 or higher against them since 2018, two more boasts a wRC+ above 125, and all likely members of the starting lineup have a wRC+ of 105 or higher.

As was the case last night, I'm going back to the well touting Giancarlo Stanton ($3,600) and Aaron Judge ($3,200). DJ LeMahieu ($3,900), Luke Voit ($3,000), and Gio Urshela ($2,600) are all fantastic options to mix and match around the hulking duo of Stanton and Judge in full, four-person stacks.

Houston Astros

It's a small-ish main slate tonight, so it's unlikely any talented offense completely slips through the wickets. Still, I believe the Houston Astros could go slightly under rostered relative to their massive ceiling in a plus matchup, even after their offensive outburst last night. That's simply the nature of sharing a slate with a game at Coors Field.

Mike Foltynewicz is reliably taking the bump for the Texas Rangers, but he's a shell of what he was at his best in 2018. He has an underwhelming 4.50 ERA and 4.08 SIERA in seven starts spanning 40 innings pitched this season. However, the most noteworthy statistic in his profile is his 2.48 homers per nine innings yielded to hitters this year. Homer woes aren't a recent development, either. Since 2019, he's yielded 2.08 homers per nine innings in 160 and 1/3 innings pitched since 2019.

Foltynewicz has been giving to righties and lefties alike. He's coughed up a .532 slugging percentage and .354 wOBA to righties. Folynewicz has been even more brutal against lefties, yielding a .676 slugging percentage and .435 wOBA to them.

You can stack against Fotlynewicz with all of Houston's top hitters. However, Yordan Alvarez ($4,200) is my favorite, setting righties ablaze for a .409 on-base percentage, .331 ISO, and 179 wRC+ since reaching The Show in 2019. I'm also digging Michael Brantley ($3,200), Alex Bregman ($3,800), and Carlos Correa ($2,900).

If you're looking for a potential contrarian play in this stack, give Kyle Tucker ($3,300) a look. The left-handed-hitting outfielder's .239 ISO is the number I'm locked in on. His top-shelf power is tailor-made for punishing Folty's struggles with lefties.

Joshua Shepardson is not a FanDuel employee. In addition to providing DFS gameplay advice, Joshua Shepardson also participates in DFS contests on FanDuel using his personal account, username bchad50. While the strategies and player selections recommended in his articles are his/her personal views, he/she may deploy different strategies and player selections when entering contests with his/her personal account. The views expressed in his/her articles are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of FanDuel.