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Chi/Cle First Five under. Watch this Cease and Civale kids!
Game 1 first five under 5.5 big play
Dylan Cease fits the profile of a high pedigree, great stuff, great minor league performance prospect that struggled mightly at times in his first big league appearances, and seems to show great potential to make some tweaks.
Cease was above slot HS draft pick by Theo Epstein, who took a flyer on his 100 mph fastball even though Cease was already slated to have tommy john surgery. In the sox organization he put up video game numbers at times. He struggled at the big league level as his 90 percentile high velocity high spin rate fast ball, had a bottom 10% of the league spin axis and was super straight and hittable. I don't have much evidence of him making major tweaks in the off season to correct that, other than a few articles about him changing his pitching motion to correct some over rotation issues to get better arm side movement on his 4 seamer that averaged 96.4 MPH last year. I'm cautiously optimistic that he will start to live up to some of his hype this year, despite not being a big fan of pitching coach Don Cooper. This guy's stuff is just too good to be a +5 era. he did have a very strong sept finish to his year, with a 3.00 era and .211 opposing BA. I think he has a chance of being under valued for a few starts this year. But i'll only put a small play on the Sox ml.
Aaron Civale for the Cleveland indigenous people also has great stuff, not a high velocity fastball but great movement. He's not an under the radar guy though, as he had a great minor league run through the system and in 10 games last year at the big league level had a 2.34 era and a 1.04 whip .216 batting avg against, this coming after striking out the side in his big league inning.
Civale has 6 freaking pitches. His cutter is outstanding with 5.5 inches of horizontal break (avg is 2 inches) only 6 other pitchers had better movement on their cutters in all of baseball.
His fastball spin rate is in the 85th percentile with 2,805 rpms his curve and slider are the really inriguing pitches though. His curve has an avg of 2,930 rpms which puts him in the 95th percentile, only 8 pitchers had a better avg drop on their curveballs then Civale's 67.7 inches
only 2 hitters were able to actually get a hit off his equally impressive slider. All in all major league hitters weren't getting very solid contact on him, with an average exit velocity of 86.6 and a tiny barrel rate of 2.4%. He also has very good control.
I think people are aware of this kid by and large and the lines won't be too sneaky, but there is a chance the market will be a little behind on his full potential and he'll have some nice underdog lines in the first few weeks of the season.
I think only one of these guys needs to be very good today to stay under the 5.5 total and with the wind blowing in 11 mph I feel a little better about the power in the lineups.
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Originally Posted by Chi_archie
