Parker Messick

While Messick is clearly a big-league starter due to the depth of his arsenal and his ability to handle a heavy workload, he performed a little over his head across seven starts in the majors to close 2025. Messick is a crafty, 25-year-old lefty with a burly 6-foot, 225-pound frame and three straight years of 121-plus innings. He logged a 3.47 ERA, 1.22 WHIP and 18.8 K-BB% across 98.2 innings (20 starts) at Triple-A before logging a 2.72 ERA, 1.31 WHIP and 38 strikeouts in 39.2 innings for the big club. His 3.6 percent walk rate and 47.9 percent groundball rate in the majors were easily better than any such rates he logged in the minors, while his 11.5 percent swinging-strike rate was lower than at any of his minor-league stops. Messick throws two distinct low-90s fastballs as well as a slider, curveball and changeup -- all of which were thrown at least 13 percent of the time in the majors. His two breaking balls have extreme horizontal movement and he logged a 31.2 percent whiff rate with his changeup, which is reserved primarily for right-handed batters. Given how well he pitched in the majors, Messick should be penciled into the Opening Day rotation, just don't expect him to prevent runs at the same clip over a full season. Read Past Outlooks