Fantasy Baseball: Corbin Burnes showed Cy Young form in his first start and here's how projects rest of season

Burnes might be back to being a Fantasy Baseball league winner

A lot of things went wrong for Corbin Burnes in 2023. His cutter velocity dipped, especially in the first half of the season, when he was sitting around 94 mph with the pitch, and he either lost the feel for his slider or had to adjust how he threw it to try to generate the whiffs he wasn't getting with the cutter. That he still ended up with a 3.39 ERA and 25.5% strikeout rate despite those changes says something about what a good pitcher he is, but it was still a legitimate step back from the previous three seasons when he had been arguably the best pitcher in baseball.

And he looked more like that guy in his Opening Day start against the Angels last week. Sure, it's the Angels, who are more a collection of sad spare parts orbiting Mike Trout's star than an actual baseball team these days, but still, it was a vintage Burnes outing, with 11 strikeouts and no walks over six one-hit innings. And, more importantly than the results was the fact that Burnes looked like the pre-2023 version of himself more than he did at pretty much any point last season.

Burnes was back up to averaging 95 mph with his cutter, where he was in 2021 and 2022, and that's the place to start since it's Burnes' go-to pitch. However, he also rediscovered his prior slider form, adding a few ticks of velocity and losing much of the sweep he added to the pitch in the second half of 2023. He looked a lot like the guy he did prior to 2023, albeit with one key distinction: His curveball maintained its distinctly different shape from 2023, averaging nearly six inches more horizontal movement than he had in 2022. The curveball has always been Burnes' second and most effective pitch, and that remained true both in 2023 and in his debut; he got seven of his 11 strikeouts with the pitch, after sporting a massive 49% whiff rate and a microscopic .168 expected wOBA allowed.

Burnes was still a terrific pitcher in 2023, of course, and if all he did was pitch like that again but in a much better home park, with better run support and defense behind him, he'd have been an ace for Fantasy. But I came into the season with Burnes as my clear No. 2 pitcher in Fantasy on the assumption that he could get back to his pre-2023 level, while still benefiting from the benefits of his new environment in Baltimore. Through one start, that's exactly what it looked like.