Welcome everyone to Ben’s Pitching Preview! This season I will be getting back to my roots and focusing on my top SP options for each slate. After all, a SP Breakdown was my first ever regular article on this site when I started providing content many years ago.
Our Core Plays have been great to start the season, you can pick up a package here.
Let’s get into it!
Corbin Burnes
Happy 4/20 friends! I’m not sure about you, but I’ll be celebrating by watching an article favorite combat the San Diego Padres tonight. I was on Burnes early in the shortened season citing a potential breakout coming, and I will admit he has outperformed my expectations. Since the start of 2020, he sits at an elite 2.66 SIERA with 39% strikeouts and 15% swinging strikes. Truly ace-like numbers. This is a tough matchup against the Padres, but his teammate, Brandon Woodruff, showed last night that good pitching can win regardless of the lineup. The Padres will look to pack lefties into their lineup tonight, but that’s okay. His strikeouts have remained great at 36% vs left-handed batters, and he’s gotten more ground balls than vs righties. This could be attributed to his changeup, which he throws over 20% of the time vs lefties resulting in over 60% ground balls. Outside of “Rake” Cronenworth, nobody in this lineup excels vs that pitch. He is expensive, and will be low-owned due to match-up increasing my interest in him tonight.
Luis Castillo
Here we go again. I was all over Castillo in his last start against the Giants, and it didn’t end super great. That being said, he really only had one bad inning. He gave up two HRs in the first inning, and finished without allowing another run and striking out seven. More importantly, he got up to 98 pitches and didn’t walk a single batter. This Diamondbacks lineup is as average as it gets, and the boast a combined wOBA of under .300 since the start of 2020. The will likely back in five or six lefties, but Castillo can hope to neutralize them with his changeup that he throws a third of the time. This lineup overall has struggled with changeups over the last three seasons. All-in-all, he is even cheaper than he was in his last start, and I have to go back to the well. On a slate with Coors Field and a lot of mediocre pitchers, locking in Castillo as an SP2 appears optimal. Hopefully we see him projecting for a somewhat low OWN% in our projections closer to lock.
GPP Dart: Michael Fulmer
There’s no expensive pitching I like on this slate other than Corbin Burnes and Zac Gallen in tournaments. I’m always somewhat interested in pitchers below $6K on DK, and that happens to be Fulmer today. Fulmer was once a bright up-and-coming pitcher in the MLB, winning AL Rookie of the Year in 2016. Since then it’s been a myriad of injuries, and he is now battling for one of the Tigers final rotation spots years later. Things opened up for him with Julio Teheran getting injured, and he has now rattled off a few respectable starts in a row. The most important thing for Fulmer so far this season has been his fastball velocity. He averaged 95 on his heater in 2016, but the last time we saw him pitch in 2020 it was down to 93. So far this season, it’s been steady at 95. He’s also generating 12% swinging strikes this season, up from just 7.6% in 2020. He looks healthy, while I was never a huge fan of his coming up, I’m rooting for him to make it back. He also has a great match-up vs the Pirates, who own a sub-3.00 wOBA and 23% K’s as a team since the start of 2020 vs RHP.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
