Fantasy Baseball: 4 Pitchers To Stream for Week 9

Randall Delgado, Arizona Diamondbacks

Starts: May 29th at Pittsburgh Pirates, June 3rd at Miami Marlins (tentative)

ESPN ownership: 1 percent

We're digging especially deep for this last pick. Former Atlanta Braves starting prospect turned middling Arizona Diamondbacks reliever, Randall Delgado has started all of six games since 2014, but he's shown enough interesting skills changes and positive results this year to make him worth a streaming stab in deep leagues this week.

Delgado has struggled to refine the changeup, a pitch that's 28-plus percent swinging-strike rate made him a name to watch in 2014. Swing rate and whiffs overall are down on that pitch, which is surrendering a gaudy .385 ISO across 101 offerings. But there might be some bad luck here, though, with the pitch allowing three homers so far despite a measly sub-18 percent fly-ball rate. After all, that change is showing major movement gains while walk rate and power production against it had been trending down in each of the previous three seasons.

Meanwhile, Delgado has shown notable improvement in fastball command and effectiveness, with his four-seam allowing a career-low .429 OPS and coaxing a career-high 47.2 percent ground balls across 222 pitches.

Even if he doesn't approach 98 miles per hour like he does out of the 'pen, he should be able to give Pittsburgh some trouble Monday in his second fill-in start for the blister-plagued Taijuan Walker. The weak-hitting Pirates are a top-four offense in terms of soft contact against righties over the last month as well as top-eight in terms of grounder rate and bottom-five in team ISO.

And if Walker's blister issues force him to miss another start, Delgado gets a relatively easy landing at the spacious Marlins Park against a Miami offense whose bats have been surprisingly muted against righties on the season.

As with his start last week, Delgado will likely face a pitch count on Monday, but there's also a chance that, even if Walker makes the weekend start, Delgado might be called upon in long relief. There admittedly isn't a ton of upside here, but frankly, I'd rather take my chances on a handful of quality innings from Delgado than subject myself to a pair of potentially miserable starts from the detritus that's clogging the waiver wire this week.