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Ben Rosener looks at the fantasy baseball impact of the Kansas City Royals selecting the contract of relief pitcher Nick Wittgren and the Milwaukee Brewers reportedly signing pitcher Julio Teheran to a major league deal.
Major League Baseball’s regular season is here, and with it comes the daily influx of baseball news that fantasy managers missed in the winter months. Lineup news, actual games happening, constant waiver wire moves, pitching assignments, and bullpen usage.
This column aims to cover any and all fantasy baseball news, big or small, and how it pertains to your fantasy team. Spring training or the regular season, it's covered here.
Has a player who's usually been hitting in the middle of a lineup suddenly batting eighth or ninth for an extended period? The fantasy implications will be covered here. The same goes for injuries and injured placements and whether or not you should consider picking up a player who was recently called up. Basically, any kernel of fantasy news and its relevance to fantasy managers could be covered here. Today, the news of the day is the fantasy impact of the Kansas City Royals selecting the contract of relief pitcher Nick Wittgren and the Milwaukee Brewers reportedly signing veteran pitcher Julio Teheran to a major league deal.
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Fantasy Baseball Impact Of The Royals Selecting Nick Wittgren
The Kansas City Royals officially selected right-handed relief pitcher Nick Wittgren from Triple-A on Tuesday, per a tweet from the team’s official Twitter account.
Wittgren has logged 300.1 career innings at the major league level, registering a 3.96 ERA and a 4.01 FIP while striking out 8.45 batters per nine frames. He also allowed 2.58 walks and 1.20 home runs per nine innings.
Mostly utilized as a setup reliever, the right-hander has also accumulated 50 holds in his career, including 35 in the last four seasons.
Wittgren has enjoyed a productive spell with Kansas City’s Triple-A affiliate to start the year, compiling a 1.25 ERA and a 4.42 FIP, 19 strikeouts, and just six walks in 21.2 innings.
He’s also registered five saves for Kansas City’s Triple-A club. While it’s unlikely that Wittgren steps into regular ninth-inning duties with the Royals due to the presences of both Scott Barlow and Aroldis Chapman on the team’s roster, the 32-year-old could be a reliever to keep an eye on for holds in saves+holds leagues.
The Royals entered play Tuesday with the fifth-highest bullpen ERA in the league. Furthermore, outside of Chapman, Taylor Clarke and Carlos Hernandez, no Kansas City relief pitcher has more than one hold.
Fantasy Baseball Impact Of Julio Teheran Reportedly Signing With The Milwaukee Brewers
Starting pitcher Julio Teheran is reportedly joining the Milwaukee Brewers on a major league deal, per a pair of tweets from The New York Post’s Jon Heyman on Tuesday. Heyman tweeted the following:
Teheran last appeared in the majors during the 2021 season, making one start for the Detroit Tigers and allowing four hits, three walks, and a home run in five innings while striking out three batters.
For his career, the veteran starter owns a 3.80 ERA and a 4.42 FIP in 1,396.1 innings at the major league level. He’s struck out 7.19 batters per nine frames during that span while allowing 3.07 walks and 1.22 home runs per nine frames.
Most recently, the right-hander made eight starts for the San Diego Padres Triple-A affiliate this season, pitching to a 5.63 ERA and a 5.28 FIP in 40 innings while adding 45 strikeouts compared to 16 walks allowed.
The uptick in strikeouts was certainly an encouraging sign for Teheran, who has generally found success in the majors with lower strikeout rates. He’s struck out more than eight batters per nine frames just three times in his career and has never topped nine strikeouts per nine innings in a season at the major league level.
Though if he were to step into the Brewers’ rotation, he’d only have streaming appeal in deeper leagues at first.
The increased strikeout numbers in the minors were certainly encouraging, but Teheran has yet to show that type of bat-missing ability on a regular basis in the majors. What's more, that's all without mentioning the fact that the Brewers don't exactly have an easy upcoming stretch of games from a fantasy pitching standpoint.
The National League Central club will wrap up a three-game series at home with the Houston Astros on Wednesday. Following a four-game series that starts Friday against the San Francisco Giants to close out the home stand, the Brewers will hit the road for seven consecutive games.
Those seven games come against the Toronto Blue Jays (three games) and Cincinnati Reds (four games).
The Blue Jays entered play Tuesday with the sixth-highest on-base percentage in the league (.328) and the ninth-highest collective wRC+ in the sport (105). Meanwhile, Cincinnati's Great American Ball Park is tied with Boston's Fenway Park for the second-highest overall park factor among ballparks since the start of the 2021 campaign, per Statcast.
Get through that road trip and there's a three-game home set against a Baltimore Orioles team that has scored the ninth-most runs in the league as of the beginning of play on Tuesday. At the end of the day, fantasy managers outside of deeper leagues are probably better off looking elsewhere for streaming options for the time being.
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