Since the end of the 2011 season, I have been a fan of Homer Bailey. After that year, I recapped his performance and finished with a command to readers to “go the extra dollar, as 2012 may finally be his year.” My crystal ball was obviously working, as 2012 was indeed Bailey’s breakout year, at least from a surface stats perspective. I then projected his first career sub-4.00 ERA and boldly predicted that he would outperform Ricky Romero.

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You may or may not know this, but I’m a Braves fan. However, I’m no prospect guru and am typically very unfamiliar with every club’s farm system. Unless a player is a top prospect heavily hyped everywhere, I probably never heard of him. So it should be no surprise to learn that when Alex Wood made his debut in Atlanta, I had no idea who he was. But now I do. And I’m excited.

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One of the things I find amusing about playing fantasy baseball is that I regularly flip-flop on my assessment of players. One year I will hype a player and believe him to be undervalued, then the following year I will switch gears and suggest that same player won’t be worth his price. This is precisely what happened with Chris Sale. In 2012, he transitioned into the White Sox rotation and I was the head cheerleader. I liked him so much in fact that I boldly predicted that he would not only be the most valuable White Sox starting pitcher, but that he would also outearn every member of the Diamondbacks rotation. He did just that. But then the 2013 season came along and I was singing a different tune.

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Well not quite. The Angels front office would likely be a bit annoyed if Hector Santiago visited Disneyland during their home games, rather than show up at Angel Stadium. Two weeks ago, Santiago was part of the three-team trade that sent him from Chicago to Anaheim. Eno Sarris summed up the winners and losers of the deal at that time, but I am going to expand upon the Santiago analysis.

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No, not the Roberto Hernandez who saved 326 games and spent his career in the bullpen, silly. It’s the Roberto Hernandez who became the artist formerly known as Fausto Carmona of course! After a disappointing season with the Rays that saw him post a 4.89 ERA and eventually get banished from the starting rotation, Hernandez signed a one-year deal with the Phillies yesterday. Twice Hernandez has earned positive value in fantasy leagues, while he has torpedoed the ratios of many a team in all other seasons. Now he moves into the National League, where pitchers typically see a bump in value.

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If chicks dig the long ball, then scouts dig the high-octane fastball. And 22-year-old Royals right-hander Yordano Ventura has quite an electric one. His 97.5 average fastball velocity was the highest among every single pitcher who made a start in 2013. Even cooler, his fastball touched 101.9 mph according to PITCHf/x. It’s not outrageous for a reliever to throw that hard, as nine of them have since PITCHf/x has delivered reliable data. But starting pitchers simply don’t. Ventura officially unleashed the fastest fastball in the PITCHf/x era.

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Yesterday I reminded you all about my preseason lovefest for Andrew Cashner. What I neglected to mention because it wasn’t all that important, is that Cashner opened the year in the bullpen for the first couple of weeks of the season. Who took the rotation spot I expected Cashner to fill? Tyson Ross. Meet your early Pod’s Favorite Sleeper Pitcher.

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It was no secret that I was a huge Andrew Cashner fan heading into the season. You could say that he was my sleeper/undervalued pitcher of the year. I drafted him for my LABR team and Tout Wars squad, shared how upset at myself I would be if he didn’t make it onto every single one of my teams, boldly predicted that he would outearn every starting pitcher on both the Braves and Mets pitching staffs and lead the National League in ERA, and was most bullish on his fantasy value compared to the rest of the RotoGraphs rankers. And yet, despite posting a fantastic 3.09 ERA and ranking 41st among starting pitchers in fantasy value, I have to admit that I was a little disappointed.

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Remember when the Mets traded Scott Kazmir for Victor Zambrano? Predictably, the trade looked as horrible as we all thought it would through 2008, when Kazmir enjoyed four straight seasons of a sub-4.00 ERA fueled by his electric fastball-slider-change-up combination. But eventually, it seemed like the Mets may have known what they were doing after all, although there was still no excuse for such a poor return. In 2009 and 2010, Kazmir’s ERA approached 5.00 and 6.00, respectively, as he lost his fastball and his strikeout rate plunged. Fast forward to 2013 and if you had been asleep from 2009 to 2012, you would have thought you had missed nothing. Just another solid performance from the southpaw.

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When teams determine whether a pitcher is going to be a future reliever or a starter, one of the primary factors driving the decision is how many Major League quality pitches the hurler throws. Typically, a starting pitcher will have a larger repertoire of pitches at his disposal, primarily to neutralize opposite-handed hitters. We think of relief pitchers possessing two pitches, while starters generally throw at least three. But Tony Cingrani is built from a different mold. It seems that Mr. Cingrani hearts the fastball.

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