Small sample size, shmall shample size!

With the new season now upon us, it’s time for every fantasy baseball player’s favorite activity – a little bit of Overeaction Theatre, where we turn statistical mole hills into mountains of waiver wire additions. After all, if you’re rocking a .500 average or 0.00 ERA this deep into the season, it must be destined to continue! Right?

Well, let’s not get carried away just yet. That said, this certainly can be a beneficial time to throw some darts on players that are showing us something tangibly different this season compared to years past. Below are two pitchers and two outfielders that I feel deserve a second look (for some, a third or fourth) as potentially valuable contributors going forward based off the limited amount of looks we’ve had thus far.

Kris Bubic – KC – SP – 26% Yahoo, 72% CBS

It feels odd for me to be trumpeting Bubic’s recent successes as potentially sustainable, in no small part because I used to refer to him as “The Bubic Plague” for the damage he could do to your ratios in years passed. But things took a sudden turn for the better once Bubic was converted from starting to a relief role in 2024 as the Royals had him rework his arsenal while coming out of the bullpen, entirely ditching his cutter and converting those pitches into more sliders than he’d thrown previously. Take a look at the overall pitch usage between his last season starting and his first in relief and the differences are stark.

That slider sure is working wonders for him since being introduced, even though it’s only grading out as about an average pitch per Run Value. In fact, none of his pitches grade out particularly well per Run Value but nonetheless, Bubic was able to carry a Whiff Rate in the top 5% of the league last year out of the bullpen with his new arsenal and it seem he is now carrying that same toolbox with him as he returns once more to a starter’s role.

We only have his strong Spring Training performance and one regular season start to examine but that start was a promising one – Bubic struck out eight batters over six scoreless, tallying a 31.9 Whiff% and allowing just one hard-hit ball. Not only that, though he’ll never be a true flamethrower, Bubic’s fastball was clocked at an average of 92.5 MPH in his season debut, only 0.5 MPH below his mark as a reliever and almost a full MPH higher than the last time he took the mound as a starter.

It’s fairly common that we see the starter-to-reliever transition happen in MLB but the starter-to-reliever-to-starter path is far less trod upon, so it will be interesting to see if Bubic becomes a success story – and if he does, will other teams be willing to follow suit with their own players?

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