May Flowers: A 24 FQO Weekend

May is a fun time to mud. Devel­op­ing arms start find­ing a groove. The April rust is loose and we start see­ing more length in out­ings. For some, good con­sis­ten­cy starts to show and the cream starts to rise more. This past week­end gleaned this. I search for some­thing I call a Fan­tas­tic Qual­i­ty Out­ing, or FQO, when perus­ing MiLB pitch­ing lines. It’s one day’s work doing all the things you could ask from a start­ing pitch­er: get at least 18 outs, give your team a chance to win by not allow­ing more than 3 ER, don’t allow more than 2 BB, strike out at least 6, keep the ball in the yard, and keep traf­fic in check (a game WHIP under 1.30.) It’s not an easy feat. Of the 4,072 2025 GS in full-sea­son, only 123 have been FQOs. That’s under 3% of out­ings. Those 124 have been pulled off by 106 dif­fer­ent pitch­ers, 92 of which are yet to make the bigs. Of those 92, 15 have pulled it off more than once already:

Since we start­ed track­ing on 5/4/21, here are the sea­son lead­ers:

Say what you will regard­ing these arms and MLB suc­cess (oth­er than it’s prob­a­bly too soon to judge for most.) But the val­ue of FQO watch­ing has proved valu­able sig­nal­ing unpop­u­lar names soon to take a bump in pop­u­lar­i­ty. 2021 Jho­ny Brito was not an arm dynasty own­ers were ros­ter­ing. Nei­ther was Kil­ian or Pfaadt. Ran­gal, Otto, and Daniel would go on to get some MLB run. 2022 was Bibee and Thor­pe lift offs, while folks gave Fitts a cold shoul­der for a few years. Dob­bins is just now sought after. Aguiar could very well be amidst an MLB sea­son if not for injury. Gus­to is get­ting his MLB shot and turn­ing some heads. Of course Dana, Math­ews, and Chan­dler ascend­ed up lists. Owen Wild next?

But back to my point: this past week­end, over 20% of the entire sea­son’s FQOs were thrown in three days:

**Not includ­ed are Ty Blach, Nathan Wiles, Diet­rich Enns FQOs (for­mer big lea­guers)**

Some dynasty own­ers may start to feel fatigue this month. Oth­ers will hold on to their ear­ly sea­son spec prizes too tight­ly, bank­ing on April fool­ery. The arms bud­ding in May might be where it’s at? Here’s some fun, a strike­out from every out­ing above:

FQOs aren’t some­thing to use pre­dic­tive­ly, nec­es­sar­i­ly, but rather a sig­nal to where we should maybe put our eyes. These are the kinds of out­ings we want for our fan­ta­sy teams and check­ing out who’s look­ing the part helps. I fil­ter these out every day and high­light them in the tool you can find on the home page head­ing.

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