In the coming weeks, and in advance of me releasing my positional rankings, I’m going to be highlighting some breakout performers from last season. The first is one of my favorites, Carlos Carrasco. His early season work as a starting pitcher “earned” him a demotion to the bullpen, but as the article title would suggest, that wasn’t the last we heard from him as a starter. The 27-year old put together a brilliant season when it was said and done, and I love him for this upcooming fantasy season.

Carrasco was a one time well thought of prospect ranking as highly as 41st at Baseball America and 37th at Baseball Prospectus, but failures at the major league level caused his star to lose most of its shine. His fine work in the second half of the season served as example number one million, roughly, of players taking a bit of time to turn their tantalizing stuff into big league production. It all came together for Carrasco in a big way last year, and there is a ton to like here.

The former Phillies’ farm-hand has big velocity on his fourseam fastball and sinker. Among starters that threw a minimum of 200 fourseam fastballs, Carrasco’s average velocity of 96.20 mph was the eighth highest according to the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboard. He only threw 93 sinkers as a starter, but that puppy had some heat on it as well averaging 95.56 mph (seventh highest velocity among starters that threw 50 of them). Velocity isn’t everything, and despite the zip on his fourseam heater, Carrasco didn’t rank very highly in whiff/swing percentage. His less often used sinker, however, did rank 17th among starters with a 16.67% whiff/swing rate (minimum 50) and induced a juicy 60% groundball rate on balls in play per Baseball Prospectus.

There’s more to the burgeoning ace than his cheddar, too. His secondary offerings are tasty. Brooks Baseball credits Carrasco with throwing a changeup, slider and curveball, and all three had whiff percentages north of 15% with the curveball bringing up the rear at 16.95%, the changeup checking in next at 21.76% and the slider leading the way with an eye popping 29.23% mark.

All three are filthy pitches that rank near the top of the heap in generating empty swings. Carrasco threw more than 200 changeups and sliders, so using that as the cut line, his changeup ranked second among starters (85 qualified) in whiff/swing percentage at 46.02% and his slider ranked 17th (95 qualified starters) at 41.62%. His curveball lagged behind in usage with him throwing only 115 as a starter, but it didn’t lag behind in terms of filthiness. Using 100 pitches thrown as a minimum, he ranked tied for 10th (142 qualified) in whiff/swing percentage with a mark of 40.00%. All of these bat missing offerings resulted in a 12.8% swinging strike rate according to FanGraphs, the fifth highest mark among starters that pitched 90 or more innings trailing only strikeout studs Clayton Kershaw, Francisco Liriano, Masahiro Tanaka, and Chris Sale.

When batters were fortunate enough to make contact, they often left the worms scurrying since Carrasco tallied a 50.4% groundball rate. Back to the bat missing, Carrasco struck out a whopping 28.1% of the batters he faced as a starter while walking just 5.6% of them. He nearly matched Corey Kluber‘s marks of a 28.3% strikeout rate and a 5.4% walk rate. The similarities between Carrasco’s numbers and Kluber’s don’t end there either. Kluber finished his Cy Young award winning campaign with a 2.44 ERA, 2.35 FIP, 2.57 xFIP and 2.61 SIERA while Carrasco, as a starter, posted a 2.67 ERA, 2.21 FIP, 2.52 xFIP, and 2.59 SIERA. The only thing missing from Carrasco’s portfolio is a track record of success, but he’ll build that. He’s a fantasy ace this upcoming season and currently checks in 11th on my starting pitcher rankings.