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What's going on, everybody? Welcome into fantasy pros. This is the fantasy baseball podcast. I'm your host Joe O'Riko, joined today by a very special guest. He's one of my favorite people in the entire space. Been a good friend now for several years. It's one of the first guys who actually answered my call way back in the day and joined me for a podcast. He is the great Nick Pollock, the founder of Pitcher List, more FSWA awards than we can all count, and he deserves every single one of them. Nick, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. How you do, my friend? What is that? And it's good to see it, and I'm happy we both need to shave. We both, like like very badly need to. That's the first thing we said to each other and uh, you know, but we're not going to shave a lot of these pictures off of our rosters, are we? Hey, there you go. It's actually been a bit of a theme recently on the show because Mike Carter was on last week, big beard. And the week before that, it was James Shiano. So we've had a bit of a bearded theme going on recently here on the podcast.

We are going to be talking about Nick's specialty, of course, here, which is short stops. No, no, I'm kidding. Oh, man, really? Like DeGrom, right? Yeah, it's true. I forgot he was a shortstop. He could do everything. I think Jake DeGrom could probably catch a game and he could do whatever he wanted to in his prime.

I, my love for DeGrom is no secret, but we're not going to be talking about him today. We're going to be talking about some guys who maybe are a bit surprisingly at the top of SP rankings at the top of player Raiders, guys who maybe weren't even drafted in a lot of leagues who have been phenomenal to start the season. We have a list of 10 names, but I got to ask Nick about my guy, Kate Cavali here, before we get into the true breakouts. I would hesitate to call him a breakout with a whip in the 160 range, but it's a lot of stuff I still like back-to-back, double-digit strikeout games. I think there's still a lot of potential for Kate Cavali, but he's very polarizing. Some people think he's great. Some people think he's not even worth a roster spot. Where do you fall on Kate Cabali, Nick? All right. Joe, Joe, we've talked about pitchers for a while, right? How would you describe my approach when it comes to analyzing a pitcher? What are the things that I go for,

the questions I need answering? You look at pitch mixes. Okay. That's the first thing I think.

Absolutely. One of the top things. Yeah. You look at whiff rates, command. Are those the main things?

Yeah. Essentially, how, you know, what is the pitch mix, right? Exactly what you're saying and how does it all work together? And then when you say, cool, you've got this, this and this, what is that package, right? And what does that entail? So when you describe Kate Givaldi, what would you say his package is? Really good curveball. Fastballs are not quite as good as what I was hoping for. The fastball and the sinker, the grades, the pitch grades in terms of stuff, they're not as good as they were last year. The sweeper, the sweeper's grading out pretty well. I think it's still a pitch that is in progress. But a guy that, honestly, he's been good, but not in the way that I would have thought. the ground balls, he's not getting as many this year. The swinging strikes are down. But yet, if you look at the ERA estimators, which I know you're not a huge fan of looking at, but the FIP below three, I think is something that's interesting. He's top 15, FIP and baseball. Top 30 in starting pitcher war, despite having a BABIP that is well over 400. Well, I mean, that's going to be because of FIP, FIP and War pretty much intertwined. So I think that he's still a bit of a work in progress. He did miss two full seasons and he still, I think only about 70 innings under his belt since he's returned. But I have been a little bit encouraged, especially over these last two starts, back-to-back-back-10 strike-out games against teams that don't really strike out too much in the Braves and the Mets. Yeah, there you go. So, right, you kind of made the point for me a little bit because Kevalli has one elite pitch. That's his curveball. And actually, that sweeper is really the curveball, just a little bit more

tilt slightly more towards sweep as opposed to drop, but it's like the same velocity. And if you really

just want to paint it blue, you would not see a gap between those pitches inside the movement

plot. And then the fastballs are not really good. They are what I call empty velocity where it's sure, it's 96, but doesn't have the extension

you want, doesn't have the movement you want, doesn't have the attack angle you want.

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