Which of this year's early breakout pitchers are for real?

I've got Nick Pollock of pitcher list here to help me answer that question here on the

Rotowire Fantasy Baseball podcast.

Hello and welcome everybody to the Thursday edition of the Rotowire Fantasy Baseball podcast, brought to you by Sling. Eric Hulterman here.

Excited to be joined by Nick Pollock, founder of Pitcher List. Nick, I've been a big fan of pitcher list since before it was pitcher list. I think I would credit your work for helping me remain a baseball fan. The Phillies were terrible about 10, 12 years ago, but at least I could go on pitchergifts.com

and look up gifts of up and coming Aaron Nola.

Does that check out timing wise?

Oh my gosh, Eric, that is, that is so touching.

Yeah, if you guys don't know, it started as picture gifts in February of 2014 and got shut down by MLB in May of 2014.

And I brought it back without the gifts initially in 2015 as picture list.

That is awesome.

Yeah, live every day like it's an holiday, you know?

That's all you want to do.

Great to see how things have grown for you guys over there. Quite an impressive sight you've got going on. I'm sure most of our listeners have heard of it already, but definitely check out picture list if for some reason you haven't. We are going to use Nick's pitcher knowledge today to take a look at some of this year's hot starts.

We're going to skip over the Aces who we expected to pitch like Aces, like, say, Christopher Sanchez.

We're going to skip over also those guys who have good ERAs, but the strikeouts and walks,

the ERA estimators are bad because the analysis there is pretty easy.

We're going to take a look at some guys who are good on the surface and they look good at least one level underneath. I'm going to

try to use Nick's knowledge of the even deeper aspects of pitching to figure out just how good

some of these guys are. We'll get to all of that in a minute, but first we've got some headlines.

And Nick, I kept it all to starting pitchers for you.

Not going to make you have any opinions on hitters or relievers.

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