We re-learned a valuable lesson last night when the Dodgers, who had the highest implied run total and were a favorite to stack, managed just five hits against previously more-than-hittable Ricky Nolasco. That lesson: All good things come to an end. The Dodgers were riding a 10-game win streak and mashing the ball at record-setting levels over this stretch. All signs pointed towards this trend continuing at least one more day. Then, the team from down the freeway, stopped them in their tracks. If you, like me, stacked on the Dodgers it most likely was not a profitable night. So, how do we avoid this in the future? Well, you can’t. What we can avoid is putting all our eggs in one basket and diversity our stacking to make sure that we are hedging our bets and giving us a chance to win. Also, remember, stacking is for GPP’s (tournaments). You should not be doing more than a 2-3 player stack in cash games. It’s just not wise.

Looking at today, we’ll head over to the Vegas Odds page to get a glimpse of who they project as our top options to stack on.  As of now (keep in mind, these change throughout the day), the top five options are as follows:

  1. Boston Red Sox vs. Hector Santiago (MIN) at Fenway Park - 6.60 Implied Run Total (IRT)

  2. Cleveland Indians vs. Tyson Ross (TEX) at Progressive Field - 5.79 IRT

  3. Cincinnati Reds vs. Junior Guerra (MIL) at Great American Ballpark - 5.78 IRT

  4. Toronto Blue Jays vs. Kevin Gausman (BAL) at Rogers Centre - 5.77 IRT

  5. Houston Astros vs. Sean Manaea (OAK) at Minute Maid Ballpark - 5.29

Let’s first notice that the Red Sox hold the largest discrepancy from the team following them. So, they are the Dodgers of yesterday. Do we avoid them completely? No. But, keep in mind, that the boys from Beantown will be owned more heavily in stacks tonight.

Let’s take a look at the stadiums and weather to help us get an edge and ID the other two teams we are going to diversify with. We have Progressive Field in Cleveland, which, if you head over to the Ballparks Ratings page here at Fantasy Alarm, you’ll notice is coming in at 17th in runs scored per game and 12th in homers per game. We also have Great American Ballpark, a hitter-friendly park, coming in at 4th in R/PG and 2nd in HR/PG. Rogers Centre is 22nd / 15th and Minute Maid is coming in at 27th and 9th. Keeping in mind that runs scored number is a bit skewed by some great Astros arms keeping opponents off the board.  So, let’s go with the Reds and Indians to join the Red Sox as our stack teams.

Now, if just identifying the teams to use were all you needed to do to succeed in this game, it would be too easy. Now, you must identify the individual players from those teams to target and submit into your lineup. You can’t take the most expensive players on each team either. A common strategy that I like to take when doing this, is taking a look at the team’s projected lineup and go with the players who are running the hottest at the time.

We’ll identify the wRC+ over the last seven days for each of the three stacking teams.

Boston: 1B Mitch Moreland (190), OF Andrew Benintendi (151), SS Xander Bogaerts (105) and OF Jackie Bradley Jr. (110)

Cincinnati: 2B Scooter Gennett (189), OF Scott Schebler (128) and OF Adam Duvall (126)

Cleveland:  3B Jose Ramirez (193), OF Lonnie Chisenhall (170), OF Bradley Zimmer (122)

So, now to the fun part. Remembering our lesson today that “all good things come to an end”, we need to create a triple stack, filling our hitters for our lineup from these three teams as best we can.  We have to also use some common sense when utilizing this method. The only first baseman that shows up here at “hot” is Moreland. He’s got a L/L matchup with Santiago, so we’ll look elsewhere there. We also want to go with players that we feel will be less owned in our GPP tournaments. So, we’ll go with Schebler (over Duvall) and Zimmer (over Chisenhall) to try to accomplish that. You can always take a look at the MLB Ownership page to confirm this. The thought/hope here is that we still focus on the three most likely candidates to score runs and then spread it as evenly as possible through those three teams. Then, if the one team gets shut down (like the Dodgers last night), you aren’t completely out of it. So here is what we have:

C - Yan Gomes (CLE)

1B - Joey Votto (CIN)

2B - Scooter Gennett (CIN)

3B - Jose Ramirez (CLE)

SS - Xander Bogaerts (BOS)

OF - Jackie Bradley Jr. (BOS)

OF - Scott Schebler (CIN)

OF - Bradley Zimmer (CLE)

This leaves us with $16,300 on DraftKings for our two pitchers and $8,400 for our one pitcher on FanDuel. We’ll take a look at Ben Scherr’s Playbook today to identify those arms to fill out our stacked lineups. Let’s go with James Paxton and Mike Fiers on DK and throw Fiers out there for FD and call it a day.  As always, good luck!