FanDuel Price: $8,400
When healthy, Jaime Garcia is one of the game’s best and most underrated pitchers. Of course, any time there is the precursor “when healthy,” it means said player is hardly healthy, which is one of the reasons Garcia so underrated; we are rarely reminded of his ability for a consistent period of time.
Since 2011, Garcia hasn’t posted an xFIP above 3.39, but he’s only pitched more than 130 innings once in that span.
| Innings | xFIP | SIERA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 194 2/3 | 3.31 | 3.43 |
| 2012 | 121 2/3 | 3.39 | 3.61 |
| 2013 | 55 1/3 | 3.27 | 3.26 |
| 2014 | 43 2/3 | 2.94 | 2.85 |
| 2015 | 129 2/3 | 3.36 | 3.39 |
| 2016 | 31 1/3 | 3.16 | 3.42 |
Fortunately, Garcia is healthy right now, and he gets a stellar matchup tonight against the Phillies. Because of some electric young arms, Philadelphia hasn’t been the trainwreck a lot of people were expecting. Their bats stink something awful, though. The Phillies rank 29th in wOBA (.282) and are in the bottom third of the league in home runs (24), walk rate (7.1) and strikeout rate (23.5). Their implied total for Thursday is 3.05 runs, the second lowest projected output.
We rank Garcia as tonight’s No. 2 pitcher, projecting him to score 35.94 points. We have him allowing 1.54 earned runs on 6.57 hits while striking out 4.99 hitters over 6.57 innings of work.