Pitchers to Watch in April
Identifying Potential Early Season SP Waiver Wire Adds
One of the biggest edges in the fantasy baseball season comes from identifying and adding breakout SPs in the first few weeks of the season. Most players don’t seem to take the off-seasons off anymore, putting in work through the winter months to improve for the next year. This seems to be true with pitchers just as much as with hitters these days. We see a lot of videos of guys throwing and working at different pitching instruction clinics (or whatever I should call them).
That results in pitchers that were previously not relevant for fantasy leagues coming into the new season much improved and being useful fantasy assets right from the jump. I’m probably not going to be able to tell you who those guys are in this post, we have to wait and see, but we have some information and ideas with three weeks of spring training in the books, so we can make some educated guesses. At the very least, we can create a specific list of guys to monitor closely early on.
Here are the pitchers I’m watching most closely in the first few weeks of the season.
Louie Varland, Minnesota Twins
I am starting it off with a more well-known name. I have talked about Varland all winter as someone I like. He was really impressive for the Twins last year with a 13.9% SwStr%, 30.9% Ball%, and 19% K-BB%.
The reason he doesn’t go very high up in drafts is that until recently his role has been pretty cloudy. The first report after the Anthony DeSclafani acquisition was that Varland would go the minors to start the year. There was also the chance that he could just work out of the bullpen for most of the year, since that is what he did at the end of last year and in the playoffs for them.
But to me, it’s pretty that Varland is one of the best starting pitchers they have. DeSclafani will start the year on the IL, so Varland will get the nod, and I think he’ll just hold that job down as long as he’s healthy. I’m drafting him, but if he doesn’t get drafted in your league he is definitely someone to watch on the waiver wire early on.
Kutter Crawford, Boston Red Sox
One more repeat of what you’ve been reading all winter from me, and then we’ll get to more interesting names.
Crawford is locked into the rotation now with the Lucas Giolito injury, and I’m excited about it. I love his fastball (14.3% SwStr%, 119 Stuff+, 30% Ball% last year), and he has a bunch of other pitches to mess with after that great base (cutter, curveball, splitter, sweeper, and slider).
He checked a lot of the boxes I like to be checked last year:
The secondary stuff isn’t the greatest, but there’s a lot of it - so there’s room for growth with all of those options to choose from. I’m drafting Crawford & Varland in deep leagues and probably streaming them early on in more shallow leagues.
A.J. Puk, Miami Marlins
A lot of the pitchers on this list will have past histories of poor performance in the Majors. That’s not the case with Puk and his career 3.07 SIERA. The reason he’s making this list is because the Marlins are moving him from a bullpen role to a starter role, at least at the beginning of the season to see what happens.
He has re-tooled for this role, adding a splitter to the arsenal and drawing a distinguishing line between the sweeper and slider.
He is throwing five different pitches this spring and dominating to the tune of a 42.9% K% and a 11.4% BB% across 35 batters faced.
There really aren’t questions about his arm abilities here on a per-pitch level. The concerns are two-fold:
Can he throw 5+ innings once a week (or slightly more) and maintain the performance?
Can he throw enough strikes?
On point one: It’s not easy to go from 60 innings per year, throwing 10-25 pitches at a time, to 150 innings per year, throwing 80-100 at a time.
On point two: Walks haven’t been a problem for him to this point (6.9% BB% in 123 MLB innings), but he can’t be so reliant on the fastball as a starter, so he’ll have to throw more of the pitches that are harder to command (slider, sweeper, splitter).
If I were in a deeper league, he’s probably not someone I would even let get to the waiver wire. I would target him in the last few rounds of your draft and see what happens early on.
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