Undrafted starting pitchers who can have top 25 value for fantasy baseball in 2024

Finding value is a huge part of fantasy baseball success. While you need to hit on your early-round picks, being able to find key contributors late in the draft is a surefire way to rocket up your standings. For me, the best place to find value is with starting pitching. I started this article last year as a way to identify some starting pitchers who weren't getting enough love in drafts and I was able to hit on Kyle Bradish, Eduardo Rodriguez, and Bryce Miller (while missing on DL Hall, Roansy Contreras, and Ken Waldichuk).

The premise for this article came from The Process, by Jeff Zimmerman and Tanner Bell. In their book, they report that, in 12-team leagues, 45% of undrafted pitchers finish the season in the top 108 starting pitchers. That means that 45% of pitchers with an average ADP outside of the top 108 pitchers at the start of the season will eventually end up inside the top 108 pitchers in value. They also found that 20% of undrafted pitchers in 12-team leagues end up inside the top-25 in terms of season-long value and 50% of undrafted pitchers will have top-25 weekly value at some point in the season.

If you can find one of those pitchers who finishes with top 25 value, woo boy. The goal for today is to try and unearth who those pitchers might be. Even though the top 108 pitchers drafted in these leagues include relievers, we're going to focus on just starting pitchers who are going outside of that because, statistically speaking, it's far more likely for a starter to catapult into the top 25 than for an undrafted reliever to pop top-25 value.

For me, there are a few things that I'm looking for when trying to find a starting pitcher who could jump to the top of the heap. They're all things we saw fall into place Spencer Strider two years ago and Kyle Bradish last year, and some of them are also things that The Process calls out as being consistent among pitchers who jump from undrafted to the upper echelon.

1. A chance at 130 innings or more

2. Strikeout upside (which, to me, means a big swing-and-miss pitch apart from a fastball)

3. Fastball velocity (to me, this provides a safe floor; it's hard to succeed around a bad fastball, which I covered in this article that I'd love you to read)

4. A repertoire of three pitches or more. (I know this wasn't true of Strider, but I'm still a believer in a pitcher needing more than two offerings to limit bad days when a particular pitch might not be working).

The ADP used is from March 1st to March 13th in NFBC Online Championships, which is 66 drafts

A.J. Puk - Miami Marlins (ADP: 280, 116th Pitcher)

Right off the bat, we see that Puk is a little bit off the pace from the innings total I'd prefer to see. He threw 56.2 innings last year after throwing 66.1 the year. However, as Nick Pollack always reminds me during our podcast, those innings came as a reliever when he was throwing every other day and that puts just as much strain on your arm as a starter logging five to six innings every five days. Therefore, we really shouldn't expect Miami to cap Puk's innings if he's pitching well. He's also 29 years old and he's no longer a young prospect, while pitching for a team loaded with young pitching talent. Puk not being in their starting rotation this year is not a dealbreaker for Miami with Sandy Alcantara coming back and Max Meyer likely locked into a spot. Yet, the team needs innings this year, so they'll take them from Puk if he's going well.

So far this spring, Puk is averaging 94.5 mph on his fastball, which is down a little bit from the 95.9 mph marks we saw last year, but that makes sense since it's just spring training and he's also transitioning from the bullpen to the rotation. Puk's 14.5% SwStr% and 38.4% CSW on the four-seamer were both well above average last year, and he pounds the zone with the pitch with a 74% strike rate. My one concern with his fastball is that it had just a 37% hiLoc% last year (high location rate, which measures pitches up in the strike zone). I think he throws the fastball middle-away too often, and I don't love that he doesn't get a lot of two-strike chases on the fastball; however, he does have a 29% PutAway rate, which measures how often a two-strike pitch leads to a strikeout. That's well above league average.

Part of the reason that's well above league average is because Puk has other pitches that he can use for swings-and-misses, so hitters can't sit on a fastball. Last year, he changed his slider to a sweeper, throwing the pitch three mph slower, but with significantly more horizontal movement and drop.

Pitcher's Lists' Pitch Level Value (PLV) metric loved the pitch and it registered an 18% swinging strike rate (SwStr%) with just a 32.7% Ideal Contact Rate or ICR (Barrels + Solid Contact + Flares/Burners divided by batted ball events). He keeps the sweeper low and inside a great deal of the time, since he's facing mainly righties but the pitch allows just a 30% ICR against just righties so he can use it to batters of each handedness.

Yet, what's most interesting to me is that Puk's slider in 2022 was better at getting swings and misses. Despite being harder and with less overall movement, it posted a 20% SwStr%, 37.3% CSW, and a solid 28.3% PutAway Rate. It just got hit hard with a 44.3% ICR, primarily because he threw it low 72% of the time to righties, which means it had gyro slider movement but wasn't getting in on the hands, so righties were able to turn on it.

The good news is that Puk is now throwing both versions of his slider. He kept the sweeper but has brought back a harder slider now that he's in the starting rotation, and I've noticed him using it up in the zone against righties more this spring. That could tie them up a bit and prevent as much hard contact. In 2022, he was also good at using the harder slider to get ahead in the count, with a 65% True First Strike Rate (TF-Str%) which means the pitch was actually a strike and not put in play.

So Puk now has at least three pitches that he can use, even if we don't count the sinker he mixes in sparingly. I think that will be huge for allowing him to get through a lineup three times and give him the ability to go five or six innings in a given start.

But what about the final piece of the puzzle: Does Puk have strikeout upside? Well, he has 15 strikeouts in 8.1 spring innings, so, yeah. I know spring training numbers can be worthless but sometimes they also highlight things that we know. Puk has a career 28.8% strikeout rate in the majors, which is 5% better than the league average for relievers, let alone starting pitchers. If his harder slider comes close to doing what it did in 2022 then Puk has three pitches with a 14.5% SwStr% or higher, two of which are over 18%. His command has also taken major steps forward with just a 5.4% walk rate last year, even while throwing all out as a reliever.

I feel like I've written endless articles about Puk this spring, but I'm fully buying into what he's selling and I still think he's great value in drafts, even with his slowly climbing ADP.

DL Hall - Milwaukee Brewers (ADP: 283, 117th Pitcher)

Before Puk, there was DL Hall for me. Obviously, as I mentioned above, Hall was my pick last year, so I'm going right back to the well here. We haven't seen much from Hall so far this spring with just four innings over two appearances, but we can use last year's changes to hint at what we're going to see going forward.

First, as the main return in the Corbin Burnes trade, you have to assume the Brewers want Hall to start this year. They also have no sure things in their rotation aside from Freddy Peralta and a currently banged-up Wade Miley, which will give Hall a bit of a longer leash. Now, the Brewers won't run Hall into the ground because they are invested in his long-term health, but Steamer has him projected for 125 innings after throwing 68.1 last year, and I think that's a reachable outcome for him, especially with what we said above about relievers moving to the rotation, so he checks our first box of potential innings.

When it comes to fastball success, I believe Hall will have that going for him as well. Last year, a back injury sapped some of his velocity early in the season, but he was back hovering around 96 mph as a reliever in Baltimore and has been throwing 95.4 mph this spring. That's more than enough from the left side. Hall also gets 7.0 feet of extension on his four-seam and last year posted 14.5 inches of Induced Vertical Break (iVB), which is just around average. That release extension is a big deal and, as a Brewer Fanatic article pointed out, became more consistent after Hall's back healed and he moved his position on the rubber to enable him to get downhill more consistently.

As Nick's tweet above mentions, Hall used the fastball up in the zone often, with a 55% hiLoc%, which we love to see but it hasn't been a great strikeout pitch for him. Interestingly, Hall had a 16.6% SwStr% on his four-seam last year, but just a 20% PutAway Rate, which is slightly above league average for relievers, and had a well below average two-strike chase rate. Perhaps he wasn't elevating his two-strike fastballs enough but it's curious to see a pitch that misses bats early in counts not miss many bats in two-strike counts. To me, that suggests issues with sequencing or location more than the pitch itself, which is in line with what Nick suggested above since Hall's fastball had a 57% hiLoc% to lefties and a 53% mark to righties. Both of which could go up.

However, the good news is that Hall saw real improvement from his breaking pitches last year. He has spoken openly about last year’s back injury causing him to lose velocity on his fastball, which was a blessing in disguise because it forced him to focus on his off-speed. That, in part, led to a tweak in his slider to be four mph harder with a heavier actual break. It still has much of the same horizontal movement, but it’s moving much more vertically which caused the pitch to see a huge bump in Stuff+ grades, and I think it gives him another level of upside.

The season-long metrics on the slider will obviously not be indicative of the full effect of those changes; however, according to Alex Chamberlain's Pitch Leaderboard, the previous version of his slider had just a 7.7% SwStr% in March and April, but the pitch was up to a 15.1% SwStr% in the final month of the season. Changing a pitch grip and movement mid-season is extremely difficult, but the grades and movement here are promising, so a full offseason of work on the pitch should lead to even better results in 2024.

However, in his first start of the spring, we also saw Hall throw his older sweepier slider that was slower and had less depth. It's unclear if he plans to work both versions of the slider into his arsenal this year, but having that as an option would be great for keeping hitters off-balance and giving them different looks. It would be especially beneficial against lefties since Hall also possesses a true plus change-up he can use against righties. Last year, the pitch posted a 20% SwStr% with a 41% chase rate and just a 27% ICR, so it gets tons of swings and misses, both in and out of the zone, and doesn't give up a lot of hard contact. He uses the pitch exclusively to righties, so he keeps it away almost two-thirds of the time but doesn't have any problem using it both up and down in the zone. While we usually don't want to see change-ups up, since the pitch tunnels well with his fastball, it can be effective when used from time to time.

All of this gives Hall three pitches we like with the possibility of a fourth pitch in his old slider and a fifth pitch in his rarely-used curveball. We saw clear changes last year that led to improvements in both his performance and his pitch-level grades, and he appears to now have the runway to work on solidifying those changes without fear of losing his spot in the rotation. All of that makes me confident that this will be a strong year for the former top prospect.

Reese Olson - Detroit Tigers (ADP: 293, 121st Pitcher)

I was not as sold on Olson coming into Spring Training as the other pitchers here, but that had more to do with the fact that I didn't think he'd be in the Tigers' rotation. With Matt Manning and Casey Mize both back from injuries, it seemed like Olson would be on the outside looking in, but there has been some chatter that Mize could start the year on the IL to ease him back into a normal workload and Olson has looked great this spring after pitching to a 3.99 ERA in 103.2 innings last year. If he does land in the rotation, Olson could push for 150-160 innings, considering he threw over 140 last year between the majors and Triple-A. That type of workload could give him a real leg up over the other names on this list.

This is a good thing because his fastball is probably the worst of the four pitchers I'll mention here. Olson throws the pitch around 95 mph, which is fine, but he gets just six feet of extension and 14 inches of iVB, both of which are below average. As a result, the pitch grades out poorly by Stuff+ and PLV. Yet, I'm OK with that for a few reasons. For starters, the four-seam doesn't miss bats with just a 6.6% SwStr% but it also didn't allow much hard contact to righties with just a 30% ICR. It had a 54% ICR to lefties, which is certainly an issue, but with the other pitches in his arsenal, he likely doesn't need to keep throwing the four-seamer 43% of the time to lefties. We've also seen Casey Mize and Matt Manning both show up at spring training with more iVB on their fastball, and Tarik Skubal has made clear gains in his fastball performance over the last year, so I'm starting to trust this Tigers organization when it comes to improving the weaknesses of their pitchers.

If Olson can produce just an average fastball then we could see a great season because his secondaries are good. He has an elite slider that he throws 35% of the time to righties while producing a 23% SwStr%, 38% CSW, and just a 34% ICR. He's tremendous at keeping the pitch low and away and gets elite PutAway rates and two-strike chase rates on it. The pitch still produces solid CSW marks against lefties because he gets called strikes by throwing it outside as a backdoor slider almost 30% of the time. However, it also gets hit hard by lefties with a 44% ICR, so I could see him using it less than the 25% he did in 2023.

He can afford to do that because his curveball has looked good this spring. Last year, he threw it just 10% of the time to lefties, but it allowed a 37% ICR with a 14% SwStr%. It also had solid two-strike chase rates but average PutAway rates which suggests that better location (he threw it middle 25% of the time and up in the zone 20% of the time) could help improve the pitch.

He also has a change-up that boasts an 18% SwStr% and can be effective to both righties and lefties if he can iron out the command of it. The pitch had just a 23% zone rate against lefties last year, producing just a 5% called strike rate which is, in part, why it allowed over a 50% ICR. I'd love to see him use it more when he's behind in the count as well, pitching backward with it so that he doesn't need to use the four-seam as much to lefties. By throwing it almost 40% of the time to lefties in two-strike counts, they were able to look for it and sit on it when it started low in the zone since they knew he wouldn't get it over the plate.

We started to see this a bit from Olson in August, when his four-seam rate fell to 25% as he used the change-up and curve more often. It's probably no surprise that he had a 15% SwStr% overall that month while producing his lowest barrel rate of any month of the season. He also mixed in his sinker more against right-handed hitters, which gave him five pitches he could trust in his arsenal. To me, that's part of the reason he had a 2.68 ERA over his final seven starts with a 27% strikeout rate. If we can continue to see that kind of development from Olson, we could be looking at another Tigers breakout.

Garrett Whitlock - Boston Red Sox (ADP: 331, 143rd Pitcher)

Garrett Whitlock "is clearly not a starting pitcher" if you believe the cynicism of Red Sox Twitter. However, I do not believe that. Whitlock was a starter for his entire minor league career before the Red Sox took him from the Yankees in the Rule 5 Draft before the 2021 season. To keep him on the roster all year and prevent returning him to New York, Boston moved him to the bullpen, where he thrived. Yet, the team always planned to let him start again, and he made nine starts in 2022 and then 10 starts last year before getting injured and subsequently losing his spot in the rotation.

I understand that his 2023 season was not good, but on some level, I want to ignore much of that since he was on and off the injured list a few times, which caused Boston to shift him into various roles in the bullpen. If we believe that Michael King can be a starter due to his previous minor league workload then we should be open to the idea that Whitlock can too, especially since he threw 73.1 innings in 2021, 78.1 innings in 2022 and 71.2 innings in 2023, which is pretty close to what King had been putting up for the Yankees in his role out of the bullpen. Those innings totals make it entirely plausible that Whitlock could pitch 130+ innings as a starter in 2024 if he pitches well enough to hold onto his spot. Given the injury to Lucas Giolito and the team's lack of starting pitching prospects already in the high minors, Whitlock may have a longer lease on a rotation spot than we think.

So what about his fastball? Does Whitlock have a good enough one to establish a strong foundation for his arsenal? The short answer is yes, it's good enough. The pitch has averaged 96 mph out of the bullpen over the last two seasons, and Whitlock is throwing it around 95 mph on average this spring. While that's not elite velocity, it's above-average for a sinker and Whitlock gets elite extension and iVB on the pitch.

As a result, the pitch performed well in years past with a 34% ICR and 33.3% CSW in 2022 to go along with a 13% SwStr% which is well above average for a sinker. Now, the pitch was not as good in 2023 and, as I mentioned above, I think a lot of that has to do with Whitlock pitching through injuries and switching between multiple roles. His loLoc% (or low location) was the worst it's been in three years and his PutAway Rate was down 10%. Considering the movement profile stayed relatively similar, I think a lot of that has to do with the location and feel for the pitch.

Another reason his feel for the sinker may have been thrown off was the change to his slider, moving from more of a gyro slider to a sweeper with almost eight inches more horizontal movement. Eno Sarris has mentioned that pitchers who throw sinkers tend to pick up sweepers quicker because they are used to throwing from the side of the baseball, but that didn't quite hold for Whitlock. His sweeper had a 20.2% SwStr%, but he also threw it in the zone just 34.7% of the time, which means he couldn’t command it as well as we'd like. He did a good job of keeping it low in the zone, and both Stuff+ and PLV liked the pitch, but it had a league-average PutAway rate and a below-average chase rate with two strikes. That's not what you want to see.

The development of that sweeper will be huge for Whitlock because, without it, he doesn't have a strikeout pitch for righties. He does have an elite change-up that gets tremendous arm-side run and works well off of his sinker. He does throw the pitch 18% of the time to righties, and posted a solid 37% ICR and 20% SwStr%, so he can use it to all hitters, but it performs better as a strikeout pitch against lefties, with a 20% PutAway rate. That's good since he also uses it 42% of the time in two-strike counts against lefties, which is well above the league average.

Like most pitches, it underperformed for Whitlock in 2023 and gave up too much hard contact, but, again, that had a lot to do with location. He threw the change-up middle 33% of the time in 2023, which is well above league average and by far the most he's thrown the pitch there over the last three years. His zone rate was also up significantly, and I simply think Whitlock was not commanding the pitch as well as he has in the past, catching far too much of the plate.

Lastly, Whitlock appears to be adding a cutter this spring; however, I think it looks similar to the slider he was throwing in 2022. That pitch had a 23.3% SwStr% that season, but it got hit exceptionally hard. Whitlock used the pitch early in the count often, which says to me that it was effective when hitters were looking for a sinker but when they were expecting offspeed, its lack of movement led it to get punished. Since Whitlock now has the sweeper, the cutter/gyro slider this spring has worked well as an early offering, especially to left-handed hitters. It also gives him a fourth pitch that he can (hopefully) command and creates deception with his sweeper while the sinker and change-up create deception off of one another. That gives him a pitch mix that should be able to keep hitters off-balance for five to six innings and allow him to stick in the rotation.

At the end of the day, the narrative for Whitlock is that he has great shape/movement on all three pitches and an arsenal that works against both righties and lefties. Injuries in 2023 led to inconsistent performance and, more specifically, multiple injury stints made it hard for him to get a feel for a new pitch that he had just added to his arsenal, which is why he never had a consistent performance from the slider. With a fully healthy offseason under his belt, Whitlock should be even more comfortable with the slider and go back to being the well-rounded pitcher we saw in previous seasons. If he can do that over 100-110 innings for a good but not great team then he's a solid fantasy asset. However, if he improves on past performance with more strikeouts and can push for 130 innings then you might be getting a real bargain at his draft cost. It's likely the biggest risk in this article, but the downside is that Whitlock could be moved to the bullpen where he would become an electric multi-inning reliever again, so he should help you regardless of what role he fills.

Honorable Mention

I just wanted to give a hat tip honorable mention to Bowden Francis and Casey Mize, two pitchers who I like but don't think will throw enough innings to get into the top 25 by season's end. Mize missed all of last year after Tommy John surgery, and Bowden Francis threw just over 60 innings last year in the minors and out of the Blue Jays bullpen, so I can't see either one pushing much more than 100-110 innings this year. I'm certainly interested in drafting both in redrafts leagues, and I believe you should be too, but I just don't see the workload being high enough to qualify for the goal we're looking for here.

Prospects Who (Probably) Won’t Break Camp

As I did last year, I wanted to highlight two rookies that I like and I don't think will break camp with their teams but could "pull a Spencer Strider" by working their way into the rotation by May-June and being electric talents. Last year, my picks here were Bryce Miller and DL Hall, so not too bad. Let's hope we can hit on that again.

Jared Jones - Pittsburgh Pirates

Yes, the Pirates said Jones was in the mix to break camp in the rotation, but then they signed Eric Lauer and, well, it's the Pirates and they are notoriously slow in promoting prospects. Jones has a high-90s fastball that has produced over 17 inches of iVB this spring after being down under 15 last year. That has led to some electric results. He also has been mixing in his cutter about a third of the time and showing a solid curveball as well. Jones made massive leaps in terms of his command last season, so it's possible we're going to see pretty elite stuff with good command, which should unlock a level that people thought Jones might not reach. I know it's not a deep arsenal of pitches, but the cutter and four-seam look to be elite, so he has a good foundation to fall back on. I'm not sure how many MLB innings we get from Jones this year, but if it's 100 or more, he could pay off big time.

AJ Smith-Shawver - Atlanta Braves
Right now, Smith-Shawver seems like the sixth or seventh starting pitcher in Atlanta, depending on how you view Reynaldo Lopez. However, the 21-year-old looked great in his spring innings. I know the results weren't there, but he showed increased velocity across his whole arsenal, with the fastball coming in at over 96 mph and the slider up three mph to about 88 mph in his spring outings. The change-up also showed more arm-side run than last year, and he was using it often in the spring, getting decent whiff rates on the pitch as well. That gives him a solid foundation without even counting the curve he'll spin in there for strikes as well. I think Smith-Shawver could make 15+ starts with the Braves this season, and I think his upside is being underrated.