If July 4th is the big party with all your friends and family, then July 5th is all about the leftovers. And just like an expert grillmaster, the Fantasy Baseball team here at SportsEthos has done an incredible job this week making sure everyone is stuffed (with information) and left happy at the end of the day by providing some of the best pickups available!

But now that the celebration is over and the plates have been picked clean, we’re left with just bits and pieces as we attempt to put together another delicious meal of fantasy goodness. That won’t slow us down any though – after all, some people prefer cold pizza and burgers!

Let’s see what we have on the menu today…

Joey Estes – SP – OAK – 6% Yahoo, 10% CBS

When it comes to leftovers, you’re not looking for a fully nutritious meal – you’re after something quick and easy, with maybe one or two nutritional qualities.

Well, Estes isn’t much different. He is below league average in most advanced metrics but he shines in two specific areas – Chase% (84th percentile) and BB% (80th). To date, he’s rode those strengths to a 4.39 ERA (4.12 xERA) and 1.12 WHIP over 55.1 innings in 2024, while accumulating 43 strikeouts (6.99 K/9). When it comes to pitch repertoires, Estes mixes in three different off-speed pitches (sweeper, changeup, cutter) about 15% of the time, while leaning on his four-seam 56.7% of the time. Only two of those pitches are any good though – his sweeper has been deadly, allowing just a .136 average against it, but his changeup (.471 average) and slider (.263) have been getting absolutely tattooed by batters. His slider is particularly meatball-y, with a ridiculous 44.8% Hard-Hit rate against.

Somehow though, his fastball – ostensibly his best pitch – gives up the most hard-contact, allowing a hard-hit 55% of the time. Now, if you’re not familiar with Estes’ profile, you’re probably thinking that that’s because he specializes in getting batters to slam groundballs into the ground for an out – but if you are thinking that, you couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, Estes sits with a GB% in the 1st percentile, amongst the lowest in the league at just 21%.

So how does he continue to find future success? And is this even a player worth rostering? That can be answered by pointing to a newer metric – Stuff+. For those unfamiliar, Stuff+ takes factors such as spin rate, velocity and extension on each pitch and uses that to come up with a statistic that shows whether a pitcher has good, well, “stuff”, with 100 being league average and higher numbers being better – similar to wRC+.

Despite his struggles with his sweeper/slider, the pitch has a 128 Stuff+, while his underutilized Cutter (1.8% usage) has a 109 Stuff+. If Estes can re-work his pitch mix to better complement each other, he could have two strong off-speed pitches to work off of, giving him a chance to breakout in the back-half of the season.

League size recommendation: 14-team leagues

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