Fantasy owners looking to game their roster limitations in leagues with individualized Relief Pitcher and Starting Pitcher eligibility will have to work hard to strike gold in 2017.
Indeed, the current crop of RP-eligible starters is light on proven talent, but these six pitchers all possess some degree of potential as fantasy difference makers, particularly considering the flexibility and sneaky production that comes with their dual eligibility.
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Off the board just within the overall top 100 per FantasyPros ADP data, Duffy and his dual eligibility will not likely come cheap after his strong 2016. The 28-year-old lefty broke out last year by upping his strikeouts per nine by almost three and cutting his walk rate down from nine percent to under six. Duffy’s gains in swinging strike percentage (up to 12.9 percent last year from his 8.4 mark in 2015) and overall contact rate (a career low 74.9) allowed him to slightly outperform his 3.79 xFIP, and the current Steamer projections expect him to continue this trend in 2017. Duffy is a solid early-to-mid round asset, but resist the urge to overpay, even with the precious dual eligibility. He’s not an ace just yet.
Nova was quietly terrific after being traded from the Yankees to the Pirates last season. Limiting walks and homers will do wonders, of course, and Nova did just that over the last two months of 2016, boasting a microscopic 1.1 percent walk rate and 0.6 homers per nine. He’s unlikely to be that good over the course of a full season, but he still figures to be an excellent ratios asset, so long as you plan around the low strikeout totals. He’s going at pick 253 on average, a relative bargain, so feel free to reach for him in leagues where his RP eligibility adds to his already sneaky value. Among a SP-as-RP crop full of question marks, a rejuvenated Nova might not be the sexiest pick, but he feels like a relatively safe return on investment.
Reyes is currently the 56th pitcher off the board per FantasyPros ADP data, a steep price to pay for someone whose rotation spot is far from guaranteed. The top Cards prospect made his major league debut last season in a middle relief role where he seemed, on the surface, to thrive. But his 46 innings of 1.57 ERA ball carried with it an alarming xFIP of 4.07, suggesting that Reyes was lucky that his 4.5 walks per nine didn’t come back to bite him. Reyes very much needs to command his mid 90s heater better than the 47.5 zone percentage that he managed on that pitch in 2016. Whether he’ll be given a chance to do so over a starter’s workload in 2017 is very much up in the air, so the range of possible outcomes for Reyes is very wide indeed. Still, his strikeout upside makes him a tempting mid-round gamble in leagues where his RP eligibility is a bonus. Just be careful not to overpay.
Which Bundy will we get in 2017? There’s the Bundy who pitched to a 2.76 ERA with over a strikeout per inning over 32 plus frames during his first six starts this past summer. Then there’s the Bundy who put up a 6.00 ERA as a starter the rest of the way, his walks per nine ballooning to over five while he averaged under five frames per start. Like Reyes, Bundy carries both the prospect hype and the wide range of outcomes, with the potential for him to emerge as a strong mid-rotation asset seeming just as likely as an utter collapse. The difference here is that Bundy won’t cost you nearly as much, going off the board at pick 247 on average. There’s no harm in reaching for Bundy in the early 200s, especially in leagues where his RP tag is an asset. If he keeps walking the ballpark and struggling to get out of the fourth, just throw him back.
The former top Yankees prospect looked like a man reborn in Miami last season, adding three ticks to his fastball and cutting his hard hit rate down by over eight percentage points. Most notably, Phelps nearly doubled his 2015 strikeout rate and curbed his free passes, boasting a 21.6 percent strikeout minus walk rate that was his best major league mark by some margin. Phelps is not yet guaranteed a spot in the Marlins’ rotation, so he’s probably just a wait-and-see in most standard leagues. Still, a Miami rotation headed by Wei-Yen Chen and Edinson Volquez isn’t exactly a hub of health and stability, so there’s a better than decent chance that Phelps will get his opportunity to shine as a starter at some point this season. In deeper leagues where his RP eligibility is a plus, he’s certainly worth a late-round flier.
Triggs has fewer than 60 major league innings to his name, with a hardly impressive 4.31 ERA to show for it. Yet the sidearmer’s 3.21 xFIP suggests he was more than a little unlucky on balls in play in 2016, especially when you consider how his low arm slot and resultant 50-plus percent ground ball rate leaves a lot of his success in the hands of the sub-par Oakland defense. It’s also worth noting that almost 12 percent of Triggs’ fly balls left the yard last year, a trend that’s bound to regress considering his low hard contact rate and his home in the spacious Oakland Almena Coliseum. Most projections have Triggs taking a step back on his 8.79 strikeouts per nine from the limited sample last year, but if the young righty can develop his change up to compliment his deceptive low-90s fastball and big breaking slider, there’s a decent chance he can contribute as a back-end, standard-league asset. The RP eligibility helps, of course, as does the fact that he’s going largely undrafted in most leagues.
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Tom Whalen is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Tom, check out his archive or follow him @drillguitar.