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Posted at 10:30 AM EST.

7:05 PM EST. Betting against the Yankees is risky business but the price here is just so damn inflated that we have to roll the dice again. What we have here is a Double-A pitcher starting for New York that is a -177 favorite and that, my friends cannot be. We’ll get to him in a minute.

Nathan Eovaldi (RHP) Is no stranger to Yankee Stadium as he pitched for the Bronx Bombers for two full years in 2015 and 2016 so he will not be intimidated in this setting. At least there’s that. In fact, one could reasonably expect Eovaldi to be a little extra jacked up. Last year, Eovaldi signed a one-year, $2M contract with Tampa to recover from TJS. Must be nice. He had some September rehab outings and speculation was that he would be ready for Opening Day. He wasn’t, as he had to have surgery to repair loose bodies in his elbow. Eovaldi’s average fastball is 98 MPH. He has started three games for the Rays and has a BB/K split of 2/11 over 16 frames with just eight hits allowed. His pre-surgery velocity never translated to Ks, and despite his groundball tilt, his xERA always pegged him with a pretty vanilla skill set. It’s small sample size this year so Eovaldi is worth watching with his strong start. His xERA is 3.60. That said, this wager has nothing to do with getting behind Eovaldi. It’s all about fading a Double-A pitcher that is priced like he’s Max Scherzer.

Jordan Montgomery has fallen victim to a torn UCL, and now Masahiro Tanaka will miss some time with hamstring injuries. Needing short-term rotation help, the Yankees have bypassed non-roster Triple-A prospects like Chance Adams, Justus Sheffield, and Erik Swanson to bring up Double-A shooting star Jonathan Loaisiga, who not coincidentally is on the 40-man roster already.

Jonathan was originally a minor signing of the San Francisco Giants in 2012. He made his professional debut in the Dominican Summer League in 2013, pitching well to little fanfare, and then missed all of 2014 with shoulder injuries. He still wasn’t healthy when extended spring training broke in 2015, and the Giants released him. That’s usually the end of the story for hundreds of Latin-American pitching prospects in any given year.

Once healthy, he pitched well enough for Gigantes de Rivas in Nicaraguan winter ball to be named to the Nicaraguan national team and get offers in the Mexican League, but instead he would initially commit to pitch in 2016 for Novara of the Italian Baseball League. Before he got to Novara, though, he’d throw in front of Yankees scout Ricardo Finol in an early-February national team tournament in Venezuela and Finol signed him the next day.

After pitching in relief in the spring WBC qualifiers for Nicaragua, the Yankees assigned Loaisiga to pitch the second side of a doubleheader for Low-A Charleston on May 13th. He’d pitch 2.1 innings before leaving with an elbow injury that would require Tommy John surgery, wiping out the rest of his season and the first half of 2017. You might excuse yourself for thinking this poor kid’s career was cursed, but you are reading his Call-Up, right?

On June 26th, 2017, Loaisiga would return from his Tommy John, pitching one inning in the lowest level of baseball, the complex-level Gulf Coast League. He would then blow through the entire minors in less than one calendar year, an astounding feat that completely upended his own narrative.

After seven starts stretching out in the GCL, and amidst growing buzz about this unknown mystery pitcher, Loaisiga would make four starts so impressive in short-season ball in Staten Island that the Yankees had to add him to the 40-man roster lest he be the first pick in Rule 5. Aggressively pushed to High-A to start 2018, he toyed with hitters far more advanced than he’d ever seen for four starts before being pushed to Double-A Trenton, where he made six mostly impressive starts before being called to The Show. Between the two levels, he’s posted a 3.00 ERA and an outlandish 58/4 K/BB ratio this year.

The main weapons here are a high-end fastball/breaking ball combination. The fastball now sits 95-98 and touches higher, and there might even be some further projectability to the velocity. It moves pretty well, comes out easy, and even more importantly, Loaisiga commands the pitch extremely well. His low-80s breaking ball is labeled as a curveball, but it’s really a two-plane slurve that he manipulates anywhere from a more slidery 10-to-4 look all the way to a nearly 12-to-6 overhand curve. It moves quite a lot in various directions, and generates some bad swings-and-misses; slurve is not a pejorative here. His change is usable but has yet to develop into anything more than a third pitch that flashes average.

On age, the 23-year-old Loaisiga isn’t particularly young for this call-up, but outside of elite college pitchers basically jumping the minors, it’s hard to find someone with so little full-season experience jumping into the majors as a starter. Furthermore, he hasn’t pitched more than five innings in a start since he was in the Giants’ system. In his final Double-A start on Sunday, he was brilliant for two innings before letting up some hits in the third and then being lifted early because he was being called up. He’s also quite small—listed at 5-foot-11 and 165 pounds—and obviously has a long history of arm problems. Throw all that in the bowl, mix and shake, and despite not having real command or delivery problems, there are still some signs here that Loaisiga’s final destination could be airing it out as a late-inning pen arm. Loaisiga should have a few weeks to show the organization what he can do in the majors. The 23-year-old is skipping Triple-A, at least for now. In Double-A, he posted a 4.32 ERA and a 1.24 WHIP with 32 strikeouts and three walks in 25 innings and frankly, that’s not great at that level. He now jumps two levels and is a massive favorite. If we’re sticking to value, how can we not fade this raw rookie making his first MLB start.

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