The Change: Corcino, Treinen, Bonilla

My 12 leagues are coming to an end, and I’m scrambling in the leagues where scrambling makes sense. And so, as a selfish and lazy person, I will just scan the probables for Tuesday and discuss the names of the starting pitchers that we know less about.

Hey, it might be selfish and lazy, but it should be useful for us both.

Daniel Corcino (0% owned)
With Mat Latos scratched for the rest of the year, we’ll see Corcino Tuesday, and possibly again one more time. Unclear if that’s a good thing for us. Particularly not if you focus on his walk rates in the minors. On the farm, 24-year-old non-prospect dude walked four per nine, or 10.2% (where 8+% is the major league average). If he’d paired that with great strikeout numbers, you might not care. But 20.2% is below average these days, and that doesn’t count his transition to the big leagues.

In the bigs, he’s put up good numbers so far, in two starts and two relief appearances. But while there are some encouraging per-pitch peripherals, they come in small samples. Too small to really love his good slider whiff rate (20.6%) or believe in his fastball whiff rate (9%), especially because of the velocity and movement numbers. All of Corcino’s pitches average between 80 and 90 mph, so he’s not going to give you a great velocity differential. His change, which has gotten zero whiffs on our site, has done better on Brooks Baseball (8% whiffs), but you can see why PITCHf/x has had a problem with it. The change only goes four and a half mph slower than his sinker, with a half inch more tail and three quarters of an inch more drop. Basically, Corcino could throw a sinker that was indistinguishable from his changeup. Probably a fastball/slider guy in the pen eventually.

Blake Treinen (0% owned)
If Corcino fails to wow with velocity, Treinen at least has us covered there. He’s averaging 94 after Al Skorupa listed him as a “97+” guy when Skorupa saw him in the minors. Treinen has thrown at least 350 sinkers, so we can believe that it has a good whiff rate (5%) and excellent grounder rate (69.6%). Already, Treinen has a higher floor than Corcino on a one-game level. A 59% overall ground ball rate, paired with a history of 5-6% walk rates, means that Treinen should avoid a blowup, and if you’re thinking of streaming a 0% guy, that’s probably the best news.

Since more than half of his appearances have come out of the pen, it’s not as easy to evaluate the rest of his arsenal. With a 12.6% whiff rate, the slider is at least average. Brooks has him throwing 40 change-ups with a 15% whiff rate, which is very encouraging. It’s probably more than eight mph slower than his sinker, but it has less tail. It drops an inch more than his sinker, so it’s a different pitch. He’ll have to throw more before we know if it’s really effective, but he could be an excellent sinker, average slider, average change guy — and that suggests to me that he has the upside of a Tanner Roark, at least when it comes to a statistical comp. Where his fastball is better than Roark’s, his secondary stuff is not quite as good. Both have great command.

Lisalverto Bonilla (0% owned)
With a first name that reads like four or five different first names by the time you get to the end of it, perhaps nobody today deserves the ¡ more than Bonilla. And while he’s had some of the up-and-down walk rates of Corcino, Bonilla’s overall minor league numbers deserve some excitement as well: He struck out 10.3 per nine (27.1%) and only walked three per nine (7.8%) in the minor leagues. Since he’s got velocity (92 mph) and has already trusted his offspeed stuff enough to throw the slider and change 40% of the time, we’ve got your highest-ceilinged zero-owned starter of the day right here.

It’s even better when you get into the pitch types. On Brooks, it looks like Bonilla has gotten a whiff on 31% of his changeups! An eight mph difference and two inches of drop on a straight changeup, that’ll do, it seems. 108 sinkers in is no tiny sample, either. 65 sliders have gotten a 12.3% whiff rate, giving him an average breaker. Between the three pitches sits 12 mph of velocity gap, and with a four-inch drop on his slider (almost curve-like), he’s got a nice range of vertical movement, too.

You can see here that Bonilla has the mechanics to throw a good change (he flies open a bit), but that his mechanics might also lead to occasional command problems.

Then again, Bonilla is home in Texas against Houston, has had some homer issues in the past, and is projected by both major systems to give up 1.2 homers per nine going forward. Give him the highest ceiling, but a floor lower than Treinen’s, who faces the Mets at home in Washington and gets the benefit of an NL lineup.