The Cleveland Guardians are listing left-hander Parker Messick as the probable starter for Wednesday’s series finale in Arizona. Messick, 24, was a second-round pick out of Florida State in 2022 and will make his major league debut. He’ll go opposite Brandon Pfaadt against the Diamondbacks. Messick, a 6’0″ southpaw, has never blown evaluators away with his velocity, but he has carved through minor league hitters behind an excellent changeup. Messick has only used the changeup around a quarter of the time in Triple-A this year. He has gone to his four-seam fastball, which sits between 92 and 93 mph, half the time. He has both a slider and curveball, neither of which get more than fringe-average grades from scouts, and infrequently uses a sinker. It has seemingly left evaluators split on his value. Baseball America and MLB Pipeline each rank him between 12th and 15th in the Cleveland farm system, projecting him as a stable back-end arm. Eric Longenhagen at FanGraphs has him much higher, slotting him fourth amo
