Fantasy Baseball: 5 Pitchers to Stream For Week 7

Jerad Eickhoff, Philadelphia Phillies

Starts: May 16 at Texas Rangers, May 21 at Pittsburgh Pirates

ESPN ownership: 29 percent

Philadelphia Phillies youngster Jerad Eickhoff had some surprising helium to his draft stock this season, getting snapped up inside the top 65 starters (per FantasyPros average draft position data). Hard as it might be to believe now, Eickhoff was routinely being drafted ahead of Dylan Bundy and Ivan Nova, two burgeoning fantasy darlings whose success Eickhoff has hardly been able to duplicate as he is toting a 4.76 ERA across 39-plus innings, with a 4.75 xFIP to boot.

And so the 26-year-old is back from whence he came: your waiver wire.

A dent in Eickhoff's go-to secondary pitch is probably to blame -- there's no hard contact or homer-to-fly jump, but there is a curveball with a notable crater in swinging-strike rate and a notable bloating in walk rate.

Eickhoff has a strong opportunity to get off the schneid against some of the league's quietest bats. Sure, of late the Rangers have mustered a top-six ISO against righties, but that's come with a top-eight strikeout rate as well as decidedly below-average weighted production against the curve.

The Pirates matchup is the real peach here, though. Since the Starling Marte suspension, the Pirates have the second-worst weighted-run performance against righties in the majors, edging only the lowly San Francisco Giants, while their league-worst performance against curveballs should put Eickhoff in a nice spot to rejuvenate both his own ailing ratios and those of pitching-starved fantasy owners.