The draft’s best pitching bargains often don’t show up until after the third round, and this year’s crop has a familiar feel: college arms with real traits, some uneven track records, and enough upside to make teams dream a little bigger than the slot suggests.
Carlos Martinez is one of the more interesting names in that group. The Giants grabbed the righthander from Hofstra in the fourth round, 118th overall, after a junior season that put him on the map. The Flushing, Queens native spent three years close to home, moved from the bullpen into the rotation as a sophomore, and then took another step in 2026 with a 3.30 ERA, 96 strikeouts and 27 walks across 76.1 innings in 13 starts.
Martinez works with four pitches, starting with a four-seam fastball that sits 92-94 mph and touches 97. The pitch has above-average ride, heavy armside run and above-average extension.
What makes him tougher to line up is the pair of breaking balls: a slurvy slider and a two-plane curveball that let him attack different eye levels and both sides of the plate. Both generate plenty of whiffs and chases.
His changeup is the clear weak link right now, sitting below average because it doesn’t create enough vertical separation from the fastball. Even so, the ingredients are there for a starter, and the Giants have time to shape him.
Steele Murdock went a round later to the Twins at pick 139, and his name was already familiar to anyone following the weekly college data stories. Minnesota used a stretch of nine straight righthanded pitchers to build out that part of the class, and Murdock fit right in after the club opened with a pair of upside catchers.
The 6-foot-2 righty redshirted as a freshman, split bullpen and rotation work in 2025, then broke through after a strong Cape Cod League summer. In 2026, he made 15 starts for the Tritons, finishing 4-3 with a 5.23 ERA, 104 strikeouts and 46 walks over 74 innings.
The numbers don’t jump off the page, but the stuff did improve as the season wore on. Murdock throws four pitches, though more than 90% of his usage comes from the four-seam fastball and slider.
By season’s end, the fastball was sitting 94-96 mph with heavy cut-ride shape and nearly seven feet of extension on average. The catch is that it didn’t miss bats at the rate you’d expect, which is part of why he lasted until the fifth round.
His slider, though, is already a weapon: a mid-80s cut-gyro offering that gets whiffs in and out of the zone.
The Cardinals took a different kind of bet with Cal Randall at pick 146. Unlike the others here, the UCLA righthander was known more as a reliever than a starter, having made 66 appearances for the Bruins over three seasons while striking out 97 and allowing just 36 hits in 63 career innings.
St. Louis, though, plans to develop him as a starter, following a path similar to the one it used with 2025 second-round pick Tanner Franklin.
Randall’s fastball is the headline. This season, he threw 475 pitches and 416 of them were heaters, an eye-popping 87.6% usage.
The pitch averaged 96-98 mph and touched 100, with plus ride from a 5.2-foot release height. He also gets nearly seven feet of extension, which helps flatten the angle and play up the arm slot.
Beyond that, he has a mid-to-high-80s cut-slider that shows promise, an upper-80s changeup that still needs work, and a few power curveballs the Cardinals think can be sharpened. There’s a wide range of outcomes here, but that’s exactly why he’s such a fun fifth-round experiment.
Micah Worley gives the Diamondbacks another arm worth watching. Arizona took the lefty in the sixth round, 177th overall, after a winding path that included a former Missouri commitment, two seasons at Modesto (Calif.)
JC and then a transfer to Stony Brook. He broke out in his second season with the Seawolves, making 14 starts and posting a 3.12 ERA with 93 strikeouts in 69.1 innings.
At 6-foot-5, Worley has room to grow, and that matters because his stuff already gives him something to work with. His four-seam fastball sits 92-93 mph and has reached 98, showing plus ride and armside run with average extension.
His best pitch is the slider, an 82-84 mph gyro breaker with serious plane separation off the fastball and similar tunneling out of the hand. It produces plenty of whiffs and chases, and if the velocity comes with pro development, it could become a plus pitch.
He also has a curveball and changeup, though both are still works in progress. As a left-hander with traits, he fits the way the game is trending.
Justin LeGuernic rounds out the group, and the Royals got him in the middle of the sixth round at pick 180 after three seasons at Clemson. The 6-foot-4 lefty didn’t really settle in until his junior year, when he made 19 bullpen appearances and struck out 50 in 40.1 innings. Plenty of teams were interested, and Kansas City may have beaten some of them to the punch.
LeGuernic’s arsenal starts with a two-seam fastball that sits 94-96 mph and can touch 98, with sink and nearly 19 inches of armside run on average. Even with a low lefty slot and release height, the pitch comes in on a steeper plane than you’d expect.
He pairs it with a mid-80s slider that has moderate sweep and strong spin rates, which suggests there may be room to add more high-spin pitches down the line. He’s also shown a changeup, but it barely surfaced at Clemson and isn’t a major part of the mix right now.
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