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!
Jake Junis
Really ugly pitching slate on Wednesday night, so I’ll only be discussing two plays today. First, we have Jakob Junis, my favorite play on the slate. He has been slightly better at home in his career, and it’s great pitching weather tonight in a pitcher-friendly park. I was on Junis in his last start, and he responded with a 19.7 DK point outing, which would have been more had the BP not let two runs charged to him score after he exited the game. He has debuted a new cutter, which is going to help keep teams off balance especially while they are still adjusting to it in his arsenals. It’s also going to increase his swings and misses, he is up to almost 12% swinging strikes from below 10% in 2020. He also relies on his slider to get strikeouts. Only Austin Meadows owns a wOBA above .300 in the projected lineup vs the pitch. Dating back to the start of 2020, this Rays lineup strikes out over 28% of the time vs right-handed pitching. I was going to be on Junis anyways on this slate, but I actually like the match-up for him. I’m hoping his OWN% stays in check as we approach lock.
Tyler Mahle
Early OWN% shows that Mahle is projecting for the highest-owned pitcher on this slate, which is scary. I think Mahle is a decent talent, and he racked up over 30% strikeouts as recently as the 2020 season. His K’s do drop to below 26%, but he has still been good vs opposite-hand pitchers allowing a ,280 wOBA over his last 100 PA. It’s likely that the Diamondbacks send at least six lefties to the plate tonight, but their projected lineup features a combined wOBA under .300 vs right-handed pitching since last season. The only other pitcher that can rival Mahle’s raw strikeout ability is Ian Anderson, but he has a tougher match-up in Yankee Stadium.
With Aaron Civale off the slate due to PPD, it looks like I will be building around Mahle and Junis in my Core Plays. I will update in Final Thoughts if there are any other GPP darts I’m interested in.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
