Previously, ESPN's Jason Grey was high on Felipe Paulino's sleeper status for fantasy baseball. Now he has an update:
Earlier this week, I came away impressed after watching Paulino give up seven hits and one run while walking one and striking out six in five innings of work. While he's not quite there yet, his command has definitely improved from the last time I saw him, and he still topped out at 97 mph on my gun, usually sitting between 93 and 96. His slider also was on in this outing. It was a nasty pitch that was between 84-87 mph with late tilt, though it still got a little slurvy at times, and he threw a couple of decent mid-80s changeups with some sink, too.
While finding consistent location is still a work in progress for him, Paulino at least showed some semblance of being able to work both sides of the plate, which I hadn't seen before. He's going to have to make sure his front side doesn't open a bit too early, which leaves the ball up in the zone, but that happened less frequently this week than starts I've seen from him in the past. Consider him squarely on my sleeper list, as I saw a lot of things I was hoping to see.
Yay!
We didn't come out here to play tiddlywinks, son.
-Hal Smith
