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Griffin Canning is a starting pitcher fantasy baseball draft sleeper, and an ADP draft value for 2024. Target Canning as an undervalued SP in fantasy baseball drafts.
BALLER MOVE: Target in drafts ~pick 273
CURRENT ADP: ~317 overall
ANALYSIS: Considering he was coming off an entire missed season due to arm surgery, 2023 was a pretty successful year for Canning, who is no longer a young prospect at the age of 27. Canning set a career-high in K%, whiffing nearly 26% of batters he faced while also showing the best control of his career with a 6.7 BB%.
You can easily glean from his Statcast metrics that generating swings and misses was a clear strength of his, as was his control. However, when hitters did make contact, it was high-quality contact as he gave up quite a few barrels and hard contact.
Griffin Canning had a lower vertical release point on all his pitches in 2023
Horizontal release moved closer to the midline after more toward the third baseline, a "tighter" release point closer to his ear than over the top.
Slider
-3 inches more drop
-2023 vs. 2021⤵️ pic.twitter.com/sHEIFSuhxQ— Corbin (@corbin_young21) February 18, 2024
His fastball tops out around 95 mph, so he's not blowing it by hitters, but rather using it to set up his two best pitches -- his slider and his changeup. His curveball had just a 9.7% SwStr% and he threw it just 13% of the time -- mainly to show hitters a slower breaking ball (81-82 mph) than his slider (88 mph).
Last year, Canning showed the type of control that he needs to be effective. He also threw his fastball harder than he did at any point before his injury. As my colleague Corbin Young pointed out in the tweet above, it appears that Canning has made some important mechanical tweaks that created more movement on his breaking pitches. He's never thrown more than the 120 innings that he accumulated last season, so we will see if he can handle a full season of starts this year for the Angels.
Hopefully, the improved delivery will allow him to maintain the command that he showed last season and keep his arm healthy enough to last all season. If last year was any indication of what he's going to do going forward, he's being drafted far too late.
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