Life 2 Sports
Baseball

Fantasy Baseball Today: Wade Miley not must-add after no-hitter, Zach Plesac's back, Jays call up top prospect

May. 10, 2021
Fantasy Baseball Today: Wade Miley not must-add after no-hitter, Zach Plesac's back, Jays call up top prospect

Six weeks into the baseball season and we already five no-hitters. What's happening? Basically, pitchers are ahead of hitters at this point. The league batting average is currently .234, which if the season ended today would be the lowest in the history of the sport. While Wade Miley is celebrating, however, his teammate Luis Castillo certainly is not. You can read more about both below.

While I am worried about Castillo, I would buy low on him if I could. In fact, maybe wait until after his start at Coors Field this week. Castillo isn't the only one. There are quite a few starting pitchers you can target who are off to slow starts, including Kyle Hendricks, Charlie Morton, Blake Snell, and Dylan Bundy. I wasn't a big fan of Bundy's price tag coming into the season but if you can get him on the cheap now, I think you should. Maybe try and flip an Aaron Civale or Zach Eflin for him. The underlying numbers for Bundy look great and his fastball velocity is actually up a bit this season.

Of course, you can subscribe to make sure you get the latest episodes of Fantasy Baseball Today right when they drop on Apple and Spotify.

Reds SP Wade Miley threw a no-hitter -- the fourth official no-hitter of the season -- leading the Reds to victory on Friday evening. Miley struck out eight and faced just two batters over the minimum -- a walk and a hit-by-pitch. This is only Miley's second career complete game shutout and his prior one came back in 2016. Nonetheless, Miley has now lowered his ERA to 2.00 with a 0.75 WHIP and yet he's still just 59% rostered.

So is he must add? Scott definitively says no and he's both happy and proud of the CBS Sports managers who have left him on the wire in 41% of leagues. Scott sees the ERA as hollow and doesn't have faith he'll be able to deep into the games or compete in the strikeout category. Add that to the fact that his ERA is likely to regress and he's only someone Scott would use in two-start weeks with two favorable matchups.

On the flip side, Miley is throwing his changeup a career-high 32% of the time and it has led to a career-high 59% groundball rate. So there is some reason to believe Miley could be on to something, but the much larger sample size that tells the other side of the story should provide you with caution when it comes to pursuing the veteran pitcher.

Nationals SP Max Scherzer absolutely dominated the Yankees on Saturday. The veteran pitcher finished with 14 strikeouts through 7 1/3 innings pitched and allowed just two hits and one run -- a home run to Kyle Higashioka. For those who bought in on Scherzer at his deflated ADP, you're absolutely loving life right now as there is no sign in sight that his age or the injuries he dealt with last season are having any impact. Instead, Scherzer has delivered a 2.33 ERA and 0.76 WHIP with a whopping 61 strikeouts in 46 1/3 innings pitched.

This was his 100th career start with 10 strikeouts or more. Chris is really excited about Scherzer -- who is still his SP4 -- and I've jumped on board with him as well. The fact of the matter is, all of the underlying numbers under the hood back up the strong start we've seen from Scherzer. He's back to being one of the weekly difference makers at the SP position.

While everything went right for teammate Wade Miley, the opposite was true for Reds SP Luis Castillo in his weekend outing. That's been the story for the former rock-solid SP2 for nearly the entire 2021 season so far, and we have received countless messages all over our social media regarding Castillo -- trade, cut, hold, what do we do?!

Chris put a 0.6 out of 10 on his Castillo Worryometer. Why? This isn't even the worst stretch of his career. The velocity is not that far off from where it's been, while his spin rate, spin access and release point are all physically in the range of where they should be. The biggest issue is that his fastballs are getting demolished. The fact that there's no physical explanation for the bad numbers suggests to Chris he's just simply going through a bad stretch that he can bounce back out of it. So needless to say, Castillo is a buy-low for him right now.

Here's what Castillo had to say about all of this after his most recent start:

"What I've seen is about 70% of my pitches are staying in the zone," Castillo said through team interpreter Jorge Merlos. "I'm definitely noticing that and I'm definitely focusing on that, too. What I'm trying to do now is pitch lower so that way we can get more swings and misses and more ground balls.

"I think we're close. The reason why is we know what's going on and we know what's wrong and we know we can fix it too. I think we're definitely close and we'll be there soon."

Scott has a different take on this and has put a full 6 on his Worryometer for Castillo.

On the opposite side of Miley's no-hitter was a very strong start for Indians SP Zach Plesac. He went eight scoreless innings and has now gone 13 2/3 scoreless over his last two starts. With the exception of a two-start stretch that came against the White Sox, Plesac has now allowed just five runs in the other 34 1/3 innings. He should likely continue his run this week as he now draws the Mariners for his next start.

The underlying numbers are also impressive with Plesac over his last three starts specifically. During that three-start stretch, he has induced a 12.4% swinging strikeout rate and his fastball velocity has been up over 94 mph in each of those starts (last season he averaged 92.8 mph on the fastball). I think it's very likely we'll see more strikeouts coming Plesac's way very soon and that could catapult his value up the SP rankings the rest of the season.


Scroll to Top