Deep League Starting Pitcher Targets for the End of Your Fantasy Baseball Draft | Top Vip News

When we were looking for breakout young pitchers, we were looking for good things with the fastball (or slider); We were being greedy. Now that we’re looking at late-game, auction-dollar, and late-game pitcher types, we can relax the requirements a bit. Maybe the material isn’t as good, or the command, or his opportunity on the depth chart is more obscured. You can’t get everything you want once you’ve already selected 300 players in your fantasy draft. At that point, you’re simply looking for something to be positive about.

With these six pitchers, there is more than one thing that speaks in their favor. None of them are lower than sixth on their starting pitching depth charts, and all of them have at least one good pitch and at least one pitch they can control. They are all cheap. That’s enough to give them a chance.

We’ve listed his average draft position (ADP) as well as his projected ERA and strikeout rates using Jordan Rosenblum’s projections, which are powered by Stuff+. Things+ It uses the physical characteristics of a field to evaluate its quality. Last year, this effort landed Braxton Garrett, Mitch Keller, and Tyler Wells, which isn’t bad for the bargain bin.

ADP: ~300
pear: 4.26
ppK%: 21.6 percent

The arsenal seems ready to shake up. He has a 95 mph four-seamer with good gear (108 Stuff+) that he can command (111 Location+) as a base. The slider is average (101 Stuff+) with good sweep and again commands it well (105 Location+). The 89mph cutter is only good at things (94 Things+) but, and there’s a theme here, you can control it well (106 Location+). Take a look, he’s good at avoiding the heart of the zone and also seems to have a couple of spots he can easily cast to for each of these main casts.

Unfortunately, his changeup isn’t really good in either measure, as he hung it and was below average in movement and speed. Hitters slugged .599 with that pitch.

With all that command, maybe it doesn’t matter. With more slider sweep, he could basically feature the cutter more against lefties and the slider more against righties and be a 2.5-pitch pitcher in each hand. His fastball is the type that works with both hands. Without any improvement on the slider, he is at risk of moving into a relief role, especially since Simeon Woods-Richardson or David Festa (or even a healthy Anthony Desclafani) could push him for the fifth starter’s job in Minnesota.

But Varland has the best fastball of that group. And when the slider looks like this and has 12 inches of horizontal movement, it looks like a real weapon.

There is enough arsenal and opportunities to shoot.

ADP: 337
pear: 4.62
ppK%: 20 percent

Speaking of arsenals, Kremer has a large one. He threw six pitches at least 100 times last season. The quality of each…well, that’s to be determined, as can be seen from the lackluster projections. Consult the complete appraisal of the model:

It seems to have the makings of a three breaking ball approach. A little more libero command, a little more improvement in the curveball stuff, and he’ll be able to throw two fastballs and three breakers with above-average command of three or four of them. The fact that he throws so many pitches alone makes him an interesting candidate to upgrade.

But which release will take the step forward?

He threw his curveball with the best combination of velocity and drop in September, but hitters slugged .889 that month out of the field. He threw the cutter more times throughout the season and got good results every time, but that is already a fundamental throw for him. He threw his changeup harder throughout the season and the results were pretty good, so maybe the model is missing something there. He stopped throwing the sweeper in May, but what if he got it back?

Kremer obviously has a feel for a large group of pitches and a decent command of many of them. It may not be exactly clear which pitch he’ll figure out, but there are a couple different ways he could improve.

ADP: 423
pear: 4.04
ppK%: 21 percent

Only one pitcher in all of baseball last year (minimum 40 innings) threw his splitter more than half the time. His name was Keaton Winn.

“When I was coming back from Tommy John surgery, I had to stop throwing the breaking ball,” he said when I asked him about learning to split the finger, “so I just threw splitter after splitter.”

Stuff+ loves the pitch (136 Stuff+) and even though he threw it so often, hitters didn’t love it (.221 batting average, .347 slugging percentage). In the city where Kevin Gausman decided to throw one splitter after another and blew up, could Winn do the same?

The poll says yes (especially considering the small sample slider also looked good: 121 Stuff+). And the Giants will probably need him even if they sign a new pitcher because he’s third or fourth on the depth chart behind Logan Webb, Kyle Harrison and maybe Jordan Hicks. By the time Alex Cobb and Robbie Ray return, he may have solidified his spot on the major league roster.

At worst, Winn offers a few early-season innings in good matchups in one of the league’s best pitchers’ parks.

ADP: 434
pear: 4.04
ppK%: 24.9 percent

Here’s another pitcher in the pitching park with a decent spot on the depth chart. That’s where the similarities end. Boyle is all bluster and bluster, no command. He has earned scout command ratings as low as 20 on the 20-80 scale.

You can’t ignore the good. All three of his pitches are rated at least one standard deviation above the mean according to Stuff+, and his slider is two standard deviations better. His fastball, which has a couple of inches more travel than average, reached 98 last season and ranks among the best in the game by that statistic.

He’s probably a great fastball in things like movement and speed. He also masters it worse than anyone above him on the list, so the best news might be that he actually placed his slider in above-average placements. Maybe he has a weapon he can use when he’s behind in the count.

Would it be better if Boyle hadn’t walked 19 percent of the hitters he faced in the minor leagues, or if he had been able to place his fastball better? Yes. Is it a good sign that you were able to locate the slider in a small sample? Maybe. Typically you want a larger sample for command data.

This is a bet on things, the park and the opportunity, rather than being sure that the command is better than the minor league history suggests.

ADP: 573
pear: 4.51
ppK%: 19.3 percent

First, there are opportunities in San Diego. Behind Joe Musgrove, Yu Darvish and Michael King there are two or three open spots that could be filled by Vásquez, Pedro Ávila, knuckleball Matt Waldron, young Drew Thorpe and his former Yankee Jhony Brito. The bet here is that Vásquez and Brito will take the lion’s share of those entries due to their extensive arsenals.

Vasquez threw six pitches at least 50 times last year. The curveball and sweeper were rated above average by Stuff+, which also aligned with the results, and hitters slugged around .300 on those pitches combined. The changeup was close to average but got excellent results (.100 batting average, .300 slugging percentage). That’s the foundation: usable secondary pitches that he can use for called or swinging strikes.

The hard pitches (his four-seamer, sinker, and cutter) were his most thrown pitches, and they didn’t rank as well on Stuff+, but he had decent results on four-seamers and sinkers, probably because he places them. Well. Vasquez was one of 55 starters last year to throw four pitches (at least 50 times) to above-average locations. Sorting through difficult, non-optimal things to get to better secondaries is a tried and true approach.

One of the keys to a possible breakup may be that cutter.

Vasquez threw harder early in the season and softer with more rest late in the season, and it didn’t matter either way. Hitters slugged .650 in the field during the season. Maybe it just has to go away. Sometimes improvement comes from losing weight from a broad arsenal. By September, he was already 60 percent four-seam, changeup and curveball. Maybe even fewer cutters are your way to go.

Here’s some love for Jhony Brito (557 ADP, 4.46 ppERA, 17.5 percent ppK%), too. His pitch (the curve) may be better than anything thrown by Vasquez, and his sinker is a harder pitch than anything thrown by his teammate, but his four-seamer and slider are worse. Choose your champion: if they pitch well, they will have all the innings they want.

ADP: 724
pear: 4.78
ppK%: 19.1 percent

After you’ve chosen 700 players, you’re really looking for anything that might be interesting. The pitchers I’ve taken after the 657th pick in the couple of deep drafts I’ve taken so far include Adrian Morejon (4.04 ppERA, 22.9 percent ppK%, just a bet on things in the rotation or bullpen), Spencer Turnbull (4.57 ppERA, 19.5 percent ppK%, maybe helpful if there’s an injury to the Phillies), Ben Brown (a Boyle-style pitcher who could have a chance in the Cubs’ rotation), and Connor Phillips (4.65 ppERA, 24.1 percent ppK%, also a guy with little command and a lot of talent on the Reds). Maybe he should have chosen Bradford instead of the guys with control issues.

The Rangers lefty only throws 90 mph, but as you can imagine with that speed, he controls his pitches well. The four-seam, slider, changeup, curveball all had above-average placements. But it’s not fair to say that it doesn’t have things. The four-seam camera has above-average travel and horizontal movement, and while the shift doesn’t stand out vertically, its horizontal movement is enough to make it above average. Hitters only slugged .283 out of the field last year.

The key to him doing better is improving his breaking balls, which were terrible by Stuff+ (70 for the slider and 45(!) for the curveball), as well as the results (.800+ slugging). If you can’t, maybe you could do a 50/50 approach with the four-seamer and changeup. He has the command to make it work. He’ll also get plenty of opportunities early in the season in Texas, where he could easily be the fifth starter in April, when Max Scherzer, Jacob deGrom and Tyler Mahle will still be injured.

Or just take a couple of relievers late in your draft, there are often better options in that group when the player pool has been decimated so far.

(Louie Varland Photo: Matt Blewett/USA Today)