MLB
Fantasy Baseball: Which Mid-Tier Pitchers Could Emerge as Aces in 2017?
The top tier of pitchers might be fraught with uncertainty, but there are plenty of upside arms available after the elite options come off the board.

Kenta Maeda, Los Angeles Dodgers

There’s a little bit of helium on Kenta Maeda heading into his sophomore season with the Dodgers -- he’s being drafted as the 26th pitcher off the board on average, in the range of more proven assets like Jose Quintana, Rick Porcello, and Julio Teheran. But is there a chance that the 28-year-old hurler is actually being under drafted?

Even without overwhelming velocity (his not-so-hot heater averages 90 miles per hour), Maeda’s quietly superb rookie year saw him tie for the 12th-best swinging-strike rate in the majors, along with a top-25 mark in strikeout-minus-walk rate (K-BB) and a bottom-30 hard-contact rate.

He might still be one pitch away from a truly dominant arsenal -- he surrendered a hair-raising 1.078 OPS with his curveball last year -- but his command of the fastball/slider combo is very impressive. He put up a 25.2% K-BB rate on the slider and a 22% K-BB rate on his fastball.

Maeda should provide a strong floor on a mid-tier investment, and if he can find a reliable third pitch, a wild lightning-in-a-bottle season is certainly in his range of possible outcomes.

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