Vasquez, Williams, and the Pitchers Whose 2026 Ceilings Just Got Raised

As ESPN's Todd Zola detailed this week, five starting pitchers have materially outpaced their spring training expectations — not through luck, but through verifiable, Statcast-backed skill improvements. Two names stand out with the clearest betting implications: Randy Vasquez of the San Diego Padres and Gavin Williams of the Cleveland Guardians.

Vasquez is the more dramatic case. Coming into 2026, he was a streaming option at best — a guy you plugged in for Petco Park home dates when your rotation had a gap. That calculus has changed. An offseason velocity program, conducted in part under Yu Darvish's guidance, added meaningful mph to his four-seam fastball, and the Padres followed through by redesigning his pitch mix around it. He's throwing significantly more rising fastballs and cutters, shelving the sinker and slider that were his primary weapons when his stuff was ordinary. The result: his strikeout rate has jumped from a career range around 14% to 22.4% through the first month. That's not a hot streak — that's a rebuilt pitcher. Added velocity doesn't just make the fastball harder to hit; it widens the perceived speed differential on secondary pitches, making everything play up. Vasquez's upside still has room to grow as the repertoire continues to sharpen.

Williams' improvement is more nuanced but equally real. His 2025 ERA of 3.06 was a fiction — his underlying estimators sat more than a run higher, and the preseason community correctly projected him closer to 4.00. His current surface numbers still carry luck: a .231 BABIP and an 82.2% left-on-base rate are both due for normalization. His walk rate remains elevated. But strip away the fortune and regression, and there's a genuinely better pitcher underneath. The improvements in his arsenal are structural, not statistical noise, which means even when the luck evens out, his floor has risen from where it sat entering the year.

For bettors, Vasquez is the cleaner angle. A strikeout rate that has jumped eight-plus percentage points — driven by legitimate mechanical change, not a soft schedule — means his strikeout props are almost certainly still being set against his old profile. Sportsbooks are slow to reprice pitchers mid-season when the surface ERA looks pedestrian. Vasquez isn't posting eye-catching run prevention numbers, but he's missing bats at a rate that puts him in a different tier than he occupied in April 2025. If his strikeout line is sitting at 4.5 for a given start, the over is worth the look, particularly in a pitcher-friendly park context. Team total unders in Vasquez starts are also worth monitoring — a starter posting strikeouts at this rate is controlling games in ways box scores don't always capture immediately.

Williams requires more patience. Lean into the under on Cleveland team totals when he starts only after the BABIP and LOB rate have normalized and his ERA reflects his true skill level — right now there's too much regression risk baked into the surface numbers to trust the team total over. His kprop is a less clean play than Vasquez's given the walk rate inflation, but a middle ground exists: targeting Williams in first-5-inning unders once books reprice him upward post-regression, at which point the market will overcorrect.