Fantasy Baseball: 4 Pitchers to Stream in Week 2

Tyler Skaggs, Los Angeles Angels

Starts: April 10th at Texas Rangers, April 15th at Kansas City Royals
ESPN percentage owned: 37.7%

Perennially tempting but consistently disappointing Los Angeles Angels lefty Tyler Skaggs is once again playing games with the hearts of fantasy owners to begin the 2018 campaign, with the tall southpaw boasting a crisp 1.64 ERA over his first two starts, certified by a respectable 1.96 fielding independent pitching (FIP) mark over those 11 innings.

The peripherals do seem to indicate that Skaggs is cooking with gas in the early goings, with a 13.4% swinging-strike rate and well-above-average reach rate. The lefty is earning a ton of strikes with his changeup, his elusive third pitch, but also giving up a fair number of line drives that have happened to go for outs, and the 19-pitch sample on that offering is just too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

In short, it's hard to know what exactly to make of Skaggs going forward, but we do know that he's lined up for two starts this week, with an especially juicy date with the Kansas City Royals at the ever-accommodating Kauffman Stadium over the weekend. Both the Royals and Skaggs' early-week opponent, the Texas Rangers, rank in the bottom-third in team isolated slugging (ISO) over the young season, so while the flimsiness of Skaggs' arsenal does make him as high-variance as ever, he's got upside to burn for needy streamers.