I’m a sucker for cool comeback stories – at least enough that I don’t readily dismiss fringe players, former top prospects and those with supposedly newfound abilities for one reason or another who are the subjects of them. I can’t help but wonder if they’ll help my fantasy teams, so I do some research and give them a chance to convince me.

Of course, most of them don’t, just as most fantasy owners had suspected. But they’re worthwhile exercises to me, nonetheless. The rate of return in terms of quantity is low, but the potential rate of return relative to the investment can be great.

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The career transformation of Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Brandon McCarthy has already been well documented. Concerned about his future in the majors, McCarthy opted to alter his pitch selection, which led to two fantastic seasons in Oakland. Just a few years removed from that, it’s starting to look like McCarthy has reinvented himself again.

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The beauty of life as waiver wire fodder is that you don’t need to be great, or good, or heck, even a full-time player to gain entry into the club — you merely need to show up with a job opportunity to take center stage here. In the case of our two contestants this week, their long-term playing time is far from certain, but they’ve been given a chance in the immediate term to contribute in fantasy, and given their past success, that might be enough to make them worthwhile in deeper leagues.
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This past Sunday, I headed to downtown Oklahoma City to see the Redhawks, Houston’s Triple-A affiliate, take on the Nashville Sounds. The starting pitcher for the Sounds was Jimmy Nelson, the top pitching prospect in Milwaukee’s system. I hadn’t yet gotten the chance to see Nelson pitch in person, and I was looking forward to seeing him do so against a strong Oklahoma City lineup that included Jon Singleton, Domingo Santana, Max Stassi and Robbie Grossman.

Nelson is a pretty imposing figure on the mound, standing 6’5″ and weighing 245 pounds. The University of Alabama product has the type of frame that I can easily picture handling 200+ innings a year; he tossed a total of 162.1 frames in 2013.

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Coming into the season, much of the hype surrounding young pitchers centered on guys like Danny Salazar, Masahiro Tanaka, Gerrit Cole, Archie Bradley, and Noah Syndergaard. The Kansas City Royals, however, opted to hand over the fifth-starter role to the flame-throwing righty, Yordano Ventura, who had limited hype and never rocketed his way up draft boards.

He burst onto the scene in 2013, consistently hitting triple-digits with his fastball and striking out over a batter per inning in Double-A and Triple-A. The 22-year-old struggled slightly after being promoted to the big leagues, which stifled the hype as we approached the 2014 regular season, but fantasy owners who swiped him late in their drafts are celebrating Ventura’s stellar month of April. He has compiled a 1.50 ERA (2.69 FIP) and has been a quality source of strikeouts.

The goal of this brief article isn’t so much to tout his first five starts of the 2014 season, as it’s rather to isolate a couple factors that lead me to believe Yordano Ventura is poised to find significant success as a major-league starter throughout the remainder of the year.

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Yesterday, I ran out of time while writing my MASH Report to look at how the possible effects of diminished velocity could have on Clayton Kershaw. Well, using a couple of untested, but promising ideas, it seems he will be may not struggle with less fastball speed.

The worries with Kershaw stem from this tweet.

89-91, touched 92 a few times. RT @gq2scoops: Anybody know how Kershaw’s velocity was tonight?

— Dustin Nosler (@DustinNosler) May 1, 2014

He could be getting some of his strength back, but a possible 2+ mph drop could mean trouble for him. Kershaw’s fastball has at least averaged 92.5 mph in each of his six previous season. By looking at how he has produced previously at times with a lower velocities my indicate how he will do in the future.

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On Wednesday, Tony Cingrani put forth another disappointing outing, the third of his in 2014 in which he failed to complete more than five innings. Two of those starts have come against the Chicago Cubs, for whatever that’s worth. He’s expended more than 20 per pitches per inning in each of those three semi-clunkers, and each has resulted in a sub-50 Game Score.

The fact that he might labor through some starts isn’t surprising. No one expects him to lead the league in quality starts. He’s allowed seven earned runs total in the first stanza, one in the second and four in the third in 2014. I figured I’d try to discern what the particular problem or set of problems is when the folks at “MLB Tonight” on MLB Network threw a graphic on the screen comprised of those tallies. Such exaggeration doesn’t seem to have existed in his splits last season, according to info from Baseball Reference.

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It’s updated tier week! As usual, these rankings represent my fantasy value expectations over the rest of the season. While I am not completely ignoring what has happened so far, its effect on my rankings is to merely expand the body of work by a pitcher from which to analyze. Unless there is a dramatic change in underlying skills that looks sustainable or an injury, there shouldn’t be a whole lot of movement after just 30 to 40 innings pitched.

While the preseason tier rankings were technically in descending order of my projected value, most pitchers within a tier are so close to each other that you could basically consider them interchangeable. An extra win, an additional 10 strikeouts, a .290 BABIP versus .295 BABIP are all pretty much random, but can shift a pitcher’s value by a couple of bucks. I didn’t bother moving players around within a tier, which is something I used to do, but provides little incremental value.

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It’s always interesting to see the players who are often available versus owned in the fantasy baseball realm’s popular platforms. At least it is to me. I don’t know why I allow myself to be surprised. The masses flock to results, regardless of the level of talent and statistical support that come with them. That’s where FanGraphs comes in, at least for those who want to know even a little more of the why. I don’t feel as if I fit in, but I enjoy the chance to learn from the experience and hope to share a little something of value along the way.

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How about an early look at some NL Starter Tiers? With a month down, we already have a better idea of which surprise candidates might live up to the hype. We also have an idea of which veterans are at the end of their rope. And in the middle of all that, we are still waiting on the returns of Mike Minor and Mat Latos.

You’ll notice this is the NL post, so you won’t see Masahiro Tanaka ranked. Despite this, someone in the comments will say “where’s Masahiro Tanaka, you idiot?” Don’t be that person. The tiers should be viewed as tiers, not straight rankings. If I have Liriano and Samardzija in the same tier, but Liriano is ranked higher in his tier, that doesn’t matter. Being in a tier means I perceive those players to have similar value. Finally, I’m going to rank players based on albums I like. The top album isn’t my favorite or anything, I just think they are good albums and maybe you’ll enjoy them too. Feel free to comment, or recommend other albums below. Cool? Cool!

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