RADIO
Welcome back to RotoBaller's 2021 draft sleepers series. Here we'll take a look at one of my favorite breakout picks, Phillies starter Zach Eflin.
Eflin elevated his game to new heights last year. The right-hander had his best season in the majors posting a 3.97 ERA, 3.50 SIERA, 1.27 WHIP, and a 10.2 SwStr% in 11 games (10 starts). Unfortunately, we have just a 59 1/3 inning sample size of Eflin pitching well and multiple years of him being a back-end of the rotation starter that lived on the fringes of fantasy-relevancy.
However, there's reason to believe 2020 was just the start of a breakout for Eflin. It feels like Eflin has been around a while, but he's only entering his age-27 season and made changes to his game that suggest his improvement is legitimate. Let's dig into why Eflin is one of the top-pitching sleepers to target on draft day.
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Prospect Pedigree
It's easy to forget Eflin was once a highly-regarded prospect. A first-round pick by the Padres, Eflin was a key player Philadelphia acquired when they traded Jimmy Rollins and he was ranked as high as fourth in the Phillies farm system. He made his MLB debut at just 22-years-old in 2016, earning mixed results in 63 1/3 Major League innings.
On one hand, he pitched to an unflattering 5.54 ERA which included allowing eight runs in his first start. On the other, he threw two complete games (one shutout) and flashed the potential that made him a sought-after prospect.
Knee surgery ended his rookie campaign early and caused him to miss the start of 2017. He returned mid-season and pitched well in Triple-A, but couldn't put it together at the Big Leagues getting pummeled to the tune of a 6.16 ERA in 11 starts.
Eflin has been a fixture in the Philadelphia rotation since 2018 when he made 24 starts. Since 2018, Eflin's name popped up from time to time as a fantasy streamer or as a deeper league option, but a sub-20 percent strikeout rate prevented him from being a reliable option in standard-size mixed leagues.
That changed in 2020 when he posted a 28.6 strikeout-rate, a .224 xBA, and a 3.31 xERA.
Sinking In
The driving factor in Eflin's sharp improvement was his sinker. Eflin threw the sinker a career-low 11.2 percent of the time in 2018. Since he started throwing it more in 2019, his numbers improved. Check out the correlation between his sinker-usage and ground ball rate below from 2018-20.
We can see his sinker usage starts to spike in August of 2019 and with that his ground-ball rate shot up to over 40 percent.
His new pitch-mix was even more extreme in 2020 throwing the sinker 51.6 percent of the time with an outstanding 26.8 percent put-away rate. It wasn't just his sinker that led to improvement, though. He favored his curveball more often as his breaking pitch of choice and why not, that thing is beautiful.
Man, Zach Eflin's curveball is pretty pic.twitter.com/qWnLeIkWVy
— Ben Palmer (@benjpalmer) February 4, 2021
Sometimes baseball is complicated. Sometimes it's as simple as throw good pitches more often, throw less effective pitches sparingly.
Eflin's sinker generated a .246 xBA and just a .375 xSLG. The curveball earned whiffs at a 43.9 percent rate. Eflin has five pitches in his arsenal but clearly found something that works featuring the sinker. Improvements such as a five percent increase in chase-rate and a four percent increase in whiff-rate suggest Eflin's numbers are sustainable.
Conclusion
As of early February, Eflin's average draft position (ADP) sits outside the top-200. On NFC his ADP is 205th overall and he's the 62nd starting pitcher drafted per FantasyPros ADP, 211th overall. That's behind names like Tony Gonsolin and Cristian Javier who are not as likely to throw as many innings as Eflin. He's also behind 34-year-old Corey Kluber who has thrown 36 2/3 innings since 2018, and Dallas Keuchel who hasn't had a K-rate over 20-percent since 2017.
It took longer to show up in his numbers than other highly-ranked pitching prospects, but Eflin seemed to put it all together last year. He'll slot in as the number-three starter in the Phillies rotation and should be more prepared for a full starter's workload than other pitchers on the heels of 2020. Most projection systems have him in the 160-inning range which is a number not many pitchers will hit in 2021.
Pencil in Eflin for at-least 150 innings with an ERA near four and a WHIP in the 1.20 range. Eflin has three complete-games in the last two seasons so his upside on a start-to-start basis is as high as anyone in the game.
I'd be willing to draft Eflin as high as the 170 range of ADP. His combination of safety and upside at the most premium position in fantasy is not often found that late in the draft.
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