Every Team's Most Interesting Player: Pittsburgh Pirates, Mitch Keller

This is the 22nd in a series of articles about the most interesting player for fantasy owners on each team heading into the 2020 season. We are going alphabetically, so today we’re going to talk about Mitch Keller of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Pirates are a mostly uninteresting team for 2020 purposes. They were projected to finish last in a brutally tough NL Central, and then they traded their best player, CF Starling Marte, all but insuring that outcome. Still, bad teams often feature talented young players, and one such player is Keller. Just 23, Keller’s first exposure to MLB competition yielded a 1-5 record with a 7.13 ERA and 1.83 WHIP. Not particularly interested? There’s more to the story.

Keller’s whooping hid some promising things. While his ERA was ghastly, it obscured a 3.19 FIP, and was bloated by a ridiculous .475 BABIP. Keller only threw 48 innings in 2019, so it’s not hard for numbers to look incredible or awful in such a small sample size. It’s up to us to seek the context.

He showed exciting strikeout potential in the minors, and that was evident at the major league level as well, finishing with a 12.19 K/9 rate, while walking three per nine. You’d like to see fewer walks, but that’s often the tradeoff when pitchers possess the type of stuff Keller has. His average fastball clocked in at 95.5 mph, putting him in the 83rd percentile of MLB, and his fastball spin was in the Top 10%. His curveball spin ranks in the 85th percentile, and, unlike his fastball, actually rated as a plus value in his brief 2019. But I wouldn’t get too worked up about the -10.4 rating on his fastball last year; because of pitching so few innings, if it got hammered for home runs a few times that will skew the stat. With that kind of stuff, Keller’s fastball will be valuable in 2020.

The aforementioned BABIP is just screaming for positive regression, as is the crazy 13% home run to fly ball ratio he posted. He was also good at limiting hard contact and making hitters swing and miss. Opposing hitters largely made medium contact against Keller (48.3%), and had an 11.8% swinging strike rate, about two points higher than league average. Keller’s got monster stuff, and a spot in the rotation on Opening Day. He threw 151.2 innings last year between Triple-A and MLB, so he is ready for a full workload in 2020 and to begin preparing for his future as an anchor in Pittsburgh’s rotation for years to come. And the best part, he’s going No. 332 overall, 76th among starting pitchers. Nobody’s looking past that brutal ERA, and you stand to gain.