Nathan Eovaldi

ESPN (Sarris) - 

The New York Yankees' right-hander has been around longer than Keuchel had when he made his change, and he has more fastball velocity than Keuchel will ever show. But for all that velocity, Eovaldi has put up mediocre results the last few years, and his ERA has been 8 percent worse than league average for his career.



He's been toying with a split-finger since the second half of 2014, and he used it sparingly in starts to begin the 2015 season, but he didn't quite trust it for a while. Then in July last year, he really ramped up its usage and improved the movement, until he was throwing it nearly a third of the time. By mixing that up with his slider, Eovaldi began throwing his fastball less than half the time for the first time in his life.

Before Eovaldi started throwing the splitter so often, he had a 16 percent strikeout rate on the season, which was very close to his career rate (16.7 percent). After he changed up his mix, he posted a much-improved strikeout rate (20.4 percent). Eovaldi may seem like a fully-formed pitcher, but if his elbow holds up through all the added split-fingers, he may finally break through.

BP (3/4) -

Much of his 2016 performance will depend on his ability to carry over the success of his splitter, if that’s not clear by this point. Baseball Prospectus’ advanced statistics further suggest that Eovaldi is on the cusp of taking a significant step forward in his fantasy production. His 91 cFIP indicates that he’s projected to be nine percent above the league’s average in run prevention. To put that in perspective, that ranks 31st among starters who tossed 100-plus innings in 2015. Higher than Hisashi Iwakuma, Yordano Ventura, and Johnny Cueto. Higher than popular sleepers like Collin McHugh and Taijuan Walker.

It’s dangerous to put too much stock in second-half numbers. They’ve been shown to not be predictive of future performance, as full-season performances are markedly more successful in that realm. However, it seems foolish to ignore the repertoire change in July 2015 and what that means for his profile on the mound. It’s one of those cases in which on-the-field alterations were reflected in the numbers.

Of course, we tried to say the same thing about Shane Greene a year ago, and look what happened. And by “we,” I mean me. I argued that Greene’s new changeup put him in position for a big year. That proved true, too, for about three starts before he became a dumpster fire and was demoted to Triple-A.

What I tried to argue in that Greene piece, though, was that it’s difficult to wait for a sufficient sample size as a fantasy owner. By the time performance has stabilized, the price tag often becomes prohibitive. So it’s imperative that owners take risk on low-cost entities who have shown improvement statistically and have a true “scouting” reason for that uptick in success. It will fail at times. That’s unavoidable. But you also have to play the game to hit the jackpot, and I’m arguing that this is one of the lottery tickets that offers favorable odds at a lucrative return with minimal investment.