Anthony Bass (RP, SEA) - Week 20 Waiver Wire Pickups

Brady Grove profiles Seattle Mariners reliever Anthony Bass as a potential waiver wire acquisition of value for fantasy baseball leagues in Week 20 of the 2019 MLB campaign.

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ANALYSIS: What happened to the line of arms that were complicating Anthony Bass's road to high-leverage innings for the Seattle Mariners? Well, they traded Roenis Elias and Hunter Strickland, guys like Austin Adams are bound to the IL, and other competition like Cory Gearrin and Brandon Brennan have been everything from mediocre to awful. In the meantime, while he has only two saves on the season, Bass has picked up the pace significantly with a 3.09 ERA, 1.03 WHIP, and 13 strikeouts over the last 11.2 IP through July and August.

Not the Mariners have been doing a whole lot of leading near the end of games lately, but as scarce as they may be, Bass's numbers suggest that he is the Seattle reliever ready to make the most out of his late-inning opportunities. Over the course of the second half of the season, he has lowered his walk rate to a tolerable 8.5%, increased his strikeout rate from an underwhelming 15.2% to a robust 27.7%, his grounder rate to 62.1%, his soft contact rate to 26.7%, and lowered his hard contact rate from 32.2% to an insulating 23.3%. With a career-high average fastball velocity of 95.4 MPH and an 87.3 MPH slider, Anthony Bass isn't getting by on luck, and he is putting the complete package together down the homestretch in effort to make his presence more frequently felt in the ninth inning.