Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for Monday 8/23/21
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.
Oakland Athletics
The Oakland Athletics are a top-10 offense against lefties this year. Therefore, a matchup with ho-hum Marco Gonzales makes them an appealing group to stack before digging deeper.
Yet, there's more to like. Namely, they're the top offense since the Major League Baseball trade deadline, recording a 131 weighted runs created plus (wRC+), per FanGraphs.
Most of my favorite options from the A's hold the platoon advantage. As right-handed hitters, they're privy to teeing off against the .374 weighted on-base average (wOBA) Gonzales has coughed up to 288 right-handed batters faced this season.
Specifically, I love the table-setting duo of Mark Canha ($3,300) and Starling Marte ($3,900). However, there is one lefty I'm enamored with. Matt Olson ($3,900) can put a charge into the ball against southpaws. He has a .227 isolated power (ISO) against southpaws since 2018 and a .335 ISO in 2021.
Seattle Mariners
The Seattle Mariners don't possess as potent of an offense as the aforementioned A's. However, this American League West showdown has the potential to produce fireworks. The Mariners will get a lift from facing below-average righty Paul Blackburn.
The A's have had to call upon Blackburn for only one start this year. He yielded three runs in 5 and 1/3 innings in that turn. Further, he has a 4.97 ERA in 88 and 2/3 innings at the Triple-A level this year. Finally, he owns a 5.66 ERA and 5.01 skill-interactive ERA (SIERA) in 105 innings pitched in his big-league career.
Blackburn's the caliber of pitcher who can make even a mediocre offense like Seattle's look good. Despite my lack of praise of the Mariners, they do have some intriguing options in their lineup.
My favorites include batters with the platoon advantage like J.P. Crawford ($2,900), Kyle Seager ($3,500), Abraham Toro ($2,800), and Jake Fraley ($2,400). Toro culminated his time with the Houston Astros with a homer in each of his last two games before continuing to rake with the Mariners. Seager's a power-chasing option, tallying a .225 ISO against righties this year. Finally, Fraley is a steal, owning a .394 on-base percentage, .221 ISO, and 142 wRC+ against right-handed pitchers in 2021.
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.
