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4 Daily Fantasy Baseball Stacks for 7/21/16

James Shields has improved over his past few outings, but his peripheral stats indicate he's due for regression. The Detroit Tigers could bring that in full force tonight.

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 be focusing exclusively on the main slate beginning at 7 pm Eastern. Additionally, we will not include today's game at Coors Field here. Coors is tremendous for DFS, but you likely don't need me to tell you that. Here are the other teams you should be targeting in daily fantasy baseball today.

Detroit Tigers

On the surface, it would seem as if James Shields has turned things around his past five starts. He's rocking a 2.43 ERA over that span, including eight innings of one-run ball his last time out. However, that starts to look like smoke and mirrors when you see his 5.58 SIERA over that time, meaning we've got to bulk up on the Detroit Tigers.

The big problem Shields has had over that time is the complete disappearance of his strikeouts. He had an 18.0% strikeout rate the first 14 starts this year, and that has dipped to 11.3% since. When you add in that he's allowing hard contact to right-handed batters 37.6% of the time, it's easy to see why the Tigers are primed to pounce.

A slight surprise when looking at the FanDuel slate for tonight might be Nick Castellanos' price. He's the most expensive Tigers hitter, even topping Miguel Cabrera and Victor Martinez. It's fully justified, though, when you look at his batted-ball stats. He's a right-handed batter, but he still plunks same-handed pitchers with a 36.9% hard-hit rate and 41.5% fly-ball rate. His current form is borderline elite with a 38.4% hard-hit rate the past month and a 19.0% strikeout rate, meaning we could be seeing one of these beauties tonight.

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