NL $1 Option: Jon Niese

There have been requests for some deeper sleepers from managers in NL- and AL-only leagues, and so these dudes will abide. Over the next couple of weeks, Brian Joura and I will cover a few sleeper starters that you might be able to snag for a dollar in your NL- or AL-only draft. Joura kicked off this mini-series with a look at Jeff Francis this morning.

It seems that Jonathon Niese is currently in a battle with fellow lefty Hisanori Takahashi for the fifth starter position on the New York Metropolitans. If the Mets use the spring training stats to decide the battle, Niese will lose. Then he’ll end up in the minor leagues, starting every fifth day, and waiting for the Mets’ brass to finally tire of Mike Pelfrey or Oliver Perez once and for all. Because his long-term upside is superior, we’ll take a look at Niese here. Takahashi is 34, and though he features four legitimate pitches, he wasn’t a heavy strikeout ace in Japan and didn’t show a ton of durability either. He can hit the strike zone, but you wonder what will happen once the league sees him a couple of times.

Niese is in a different situation than the mid-career crafty veteran out of Japan. He is 23, was just ranked the Mets #5 prospect by maven Marc Hulet, and owns at least one strong major league pitch – his curveball. Or at least, that’s what the scouting reports say. As Hulet pointed out in his blurb on the young southpaw, his most effective pitch last year was actually his cutter (+1.3 runs). But now that’s two major league pitches, and it looks like he’s using them more and more each year and using his scratch-level 90-MPH fastball (-0.8 runs last year). It could be a nice mix even without an overpowering fastball.

There seems to be some institutional hesitancy when it comes to Niese, though. Perhaps his merely above-average strikeout rates in the minor leagues (7.83 K/9 career in the minors) didn’t inspire them. After putting together 22 starts in AA at age 22 (2008) with a nice strikeout rate (8.11), a decent walk rate (3.18), and a good groundball rate (53.1%), the Mets did call him up for two major league starts. The first major league player he pitched to (Rickie Weeks) took him deep, and it may have looked like he had a poor debut, but he did okay for a young guy and even racked up 11 strikeouts in his 14-inning cup of coffee.

Maybe it’s the constant speed of the New York news cycle, but when the team started Niese in AAA last year, it seemed to be a statement about the org’s belief in him. As could be expected, his strikeout rate fell a little (7.26 K/9), but everything else held steady and he earned his way back to the majors as an injury replacement for Oliver Perez first and John Maine second. Though the sample size wasn’t large, and the strikeout rates weren’t impressive (6.31 K/9), Niese seemed to settle down and pitched to a 3.25 FIP by limiting walks and improving his ground ball rate. His home run rate also fell precipitously (1.29 HR/9 in 2008, .35 in 2009), which was more in line with his career numbers in the minor leagues (0.53 HR/9 career in the minor leagues).

In any case, given the underwhelming nature of the starters in the rotation ahead of him, and their various injury histories, it certainly seems that the Mets will have no choice but to give Niese more starts this year. If Niese continues his trajectory by inducing more ground balls and limiting the walks, it seems that he would be a decent NL $1 option in 2010.