Jake Odorizzi, Sneaky Good

We continue this week with our tour through the Minnesota Twins fantasy options — next stop, Jake Odorizzi. (Here’s last week’s piece on Byron Buxton’s struggles and its precursor on two hot Twins bats worth rostering.)

After coming to Tampa in the seven-player James Shields trade, Odorizzi always felt a little under-appreciated among the Rays’ consistently-on-the-block starters like Chris Archer, Drew Smyly and Alex Cobb. The righty entered this season with a career ERA of 3.83 — right in line with the aforementioned trio — but was only a couple years removed from an elite full-season campaign: 3.35 ERA/1.15 WHIP over 169.1 innings in 2015. He followed that up with 187.2 innings of 3.69 ERA ball in 2016. 

Unfortunately for the Rays, the ERA ticked up to 4.14 last year — still usable in today’s homer-friendly era, but a hindrance on the trade block — and the team settled for a somewhat unheralded Minnesota shortstop prospect in exchange for his services. The Twins chose to go the trade route over paying up for the likes of Cobb or another expensive free agent. The move seems to be working out, and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.

Through 10 starts and 54 innings in Minnesota, Odorizzi is 3-2 with a 3.17 ERA and 1.26 WHIP, having mowed down 10 Brewers over 5.2 innings in his latest outing. The only real blemish on the 28-year-old’s ledger is a five earned run outing on the road against the Yankees’ monster lineup on April 23, although he had given up three home runs and four earned in five innings the week prior against Cleveland. No great sins there.

Since then we’ve seen extremely consistent results through five starts: 1.93 ERA, 1.11 WHIP and 31 strikeouts against nine walks over 28 innings. He’s given up one homer in four out of five turns, but three were solo shots. The earned runs allowed were 1, 3, 1, 0, 1, and the team went 3-2 over that span. We’re not talking about Corey Kluber dominance here, but this is winning baseball. 

Odorizzi’s xFIP appears to be sounding an alarm even on this quality stretch — it reads 4.37, thanks in part to the four home runs allowed and a 90.9 LOB%. But Odorizzi has always been a bit of a flyball pitcher, which isn’t overly concerning at Target Field or in the AL Central in general. He’s helping himself out of jams with a 9.17 K/9 and career-high 11.4 SwStr%. And the 9.5 HR/FB% over the five starts in question isn’t unreasonable. Recall that back in 2014 and 2015, as a 24- and 25-year-old, Odorizzi put up full-season marks of 8.7 HR/FB% and 9.0 HR/FB%, respectively.

Again, there’s a comforting consistency under the hood here. Start with the career batting averages he’s allowed, which over his four full seasons all landed between .229 and .250. These correspond to BABIPs that also beat the league average. In fact, Odorizzi’s .227 BABIP last season was the best in baseball among pitchers who threw 140 or more innings. There’s some luck involved in this stat, but Odorizzi has a Johnny Cueto-esque history of vastly outproducing his ERA estimators, which means there’s something out of the ordinary helping to consistently depress his ERA.

Couple the Cueto trend — whatever you want to call it, the unidentifiable reason a pitcher just whomps FIP, SIERA and Steamer — with what we’re seeing so far in Minnesota: Odorizzi’s soft contact is up a full eight percentage points — a 50-percent increase — over last season and nearly six points higher than his career average. Conversely, his hard-hit and medium-hit rates are down from last season. Strikeouts are up, the walk rate the same. Grounders are down but infield pop-ups have nearly doubled. 

Maybe the recently turned 28-year-old former sandwich pick is making good on his exemplary early career numbers. We shouldn’t expect an ERA pushing the 2s all season long, but it’s not likely to hit the 4s again, either. Odorizzi is unowned in 35 percent of Yahoo leagues and a perfect throw-in option to request in a bigger-name trade package in deeper leagues.

Follow Danny @_dannycross_.