Keeping tabs on your current baseball dynasty pitching options is hard enough. Looking for the next diamond in the rough on the minor-league side is a job all by itself. Thanks to PLV, we can look at some arms of note and the pitching prospects doing the most in 2026.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some Triple-A standouts from the season so far and check in on a Top 100 arm.
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Top 100 Prospect Spotlight(s)
Karson Milbrandt, Miami Marlins
2026 Stats: 21 GS | 92.2 IP | 4.95 ERA | 5.01 FIP | 27.4% K% | 14.3% BB% | 28.8% CSW%
Last Week: 3.1 IP | 21.60 ERA | 6 H | 8 ER | 5 BB | 1 K
There is a version of every prospect’s development arc where the jump to Triple-A goes smoothly, and there is the version Karson Milbrandt is currently living through. The Miami Marlins‘ 22-year-old righty spent the first half of the season making a legitimate case as one of the best pitching prospects in baseball, posting a 1.34 ERA with 70 strikeouts in 47 innings at Double-A Pensacola, a run so dominant it earned him a spot in the All-Star Futures Game and a climb to No. 71 overall on MLB Pipeline’s Top 100 list. Since arriving at Triple-A Jacksonville, almost none of that has carried over.
The numbers are ugly in a way that is hard to explain away. Through his 12 games, 11 of them starts, Milbrandt carries an 8.67 ERA and a 7.24 FIP, with his strikeout rate cratering to 18.5%, a nearly 20-point drop, and his walk rate sitting at 18.5% as well. He has allowed seven home runs over his last 14.2 innings alone. His most recent start was not the one that pinpoints exactly what is wrong, but it may be the one that says everything is going wrong at once: 21 batters faced, just one strikeout, five walks, and a .733 wOBA allowed. His curveball was the specific culprit, getting torched for a .869 wOBA against and serving up the outing’s lone home run, while his sweeper, by contrast, held up fine at a .297 wOBA against. That is not a pitcher who has lost his stuff. That is a pitcher whose command has abandoned him at the worst possible time. Milbrandt was never a finesse pitcher, never someone who could reliably live in the zone. But his stuff was so good that he could work in the shadow at least and generate swings and misses or poor contact. Triple-A batters are not giving the Missouri native that luxury.
To his credit, Milbrandt is not hiding from any of it. He told Fish on First plainly in July, “Obviously not pitched as well as I want to, but lots of learning. I feel like I’m going to look back on this in a couple of years, maybe a couple of months, and be like I’m happy I failed because I know how to adjust and I know how to attack these hitters.” That is the kind of quote that sounds like coach-speak until you remember he is 22 and has never had to work through failure at this level before. The walk rate is the skill to watch here, not the raw stuff, which was never really in question. His single-digit walk rate at Double-A this season and to end last year was the first time he had posted such a low number in his career. Getting that command back, at least close enough to the zone to be competitive, will be the key for Milbrandt to rebound before the season is over.
I do not think this changes what Milbrandt is long-term. Pitchers who dominate at Double-A the way he did rarely forget how overnight, and a curveball that gets barreled up in one bad start does not erase a full season of evidence that this is a legitimately talented arm. But the gap between the pitcher who showed up at the Futures Game and the one getting hit around in Jacksonville right now is real, and how quickly he closes it will say a great deal about whether he is an impact starter or merely a solid one.
Triple-A Standouts
2026 Stats: 21 GS | 97.1 IP | 5.27 ERA | 4.86 FIP | 24.2% K% | 10.6% BB% | 28% CSW%
Last Week: 11.2 IP | 1.54 ERA | 6 H | 2 ER | 2 BB | 16 K
Fifteen weeks ago, Andrew Sears had not thrown a competitive pitch all year. He was rehabbing a fractured bone spur in his left elbow, his 2026 season delayed until May, with no guarantee it would amount to much of anything. By the time you read this, he will have made his major league debut. Some minor league players are getting through systems quicker than ever, but Sears’ meteoric rise only happens when the big league club genuinely believes.
Detroit’s 10th-round pick from 2023 tore through the system once he got going: a stop at West Michigan, nine appearances at Double-A Erie where he posted a 2.57 ERA, a promotion to Triple-A Toledo on Aug. 9, and two starts later, a phone call to the big leagues. The two Triple-A outings were about as loud a knock on the door as a pitcher can make, with zero runs allowed across 9.2 innings pitched and 14 strikeouts against only four walks. His most recent of the two, on Aug. 18, was five hitless, scoreless innings with seven strikeouts, and the data behind it is even more impressive than the box score. He faced 16 batters, struck out seven, walked two, and allowed zero hits, with a swinging-strike rate of 23% for the outing. His sinker alone, thrown 43 times, was only in the zone 40% of the time, but the opposition could not barrel it up and flew out each time they put the ball in play. Of the seven balls put in play, five were flyouts. The Triple-A sample size is small, but Sears’ track record profiles him more as a flyball pitcher than a groundball pitcher, though either way, he gets plenty of outs.
Tigers manager A.J. Hinch did not hesitate when asked about the call-up: “He pitches with some intensity, he’s got real weapons. He’s demonstrated the ability to compete against anybody. So I told him inside that his best is good enough, he just needs to come out and remember the game and get to strike one.” FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and Brendan Gawlowski described him as a “low-slot lefty with a funky look,” and that description tracks with what the sinker is doing right now, missing bats from an arm angle hitters simply are not used to seeing.
Can the magic continue at the big league level? Sears is walking into a bulk relief role in a bullpen game, which is about as gentle an introduction as a debut can get, and the swing-and-miss traits that carried him here, the funky slot, the sinker nobody can find barrels for, do not disappear just because the league gets tougher. I would not expect five more hitless innings right away. But the underlying skill here is real, and the fact that Detroit felt comfortable making this call after only two Triple-A outings tells you the organization believes the stuff plays anywhere.
Christian Romero, Los Angeles Dodgers
2026 Stats: 17 GS | 112.2 IP |4.23 ERA | 5.58 FIP | 19.1% K% | 8.5% BB% | 24.8% CSW%
Last Week: 4.0 IP | 2.25 ERA | 4 H | 1 ER | 1 BB | 6 K
Nobody was talking about Christian Romero heading into this season, and if you check the Dodgers’ prospect rankings at Baseball America or MLB Pipeline, nobody is talking about him now either. He is not on either list. He signed with Los Angeles as an amateur free agent out of Hermosillo, Mexico back in January 2021, and outside of a September 2025 PCL Pitcher of the Week award, his career has mostly moved along without much fanfare, including a rough nine-start cameo at Triple-A last year that produced a 4.91 ERA. The jump to Triple-A can be challenging for most, but doing so from High-A without a single Double-A game is tougher still.
The 2026 version of Romero looks different, and the timing of the change is the interesting part. He has spent the full season at Oklahoma City, mostly working as a starter, but has shifted recently into a piggyback bulk-relief role behind veteran arms on rehab assignments, most recently pairing behind both Michael Stone and Tyler Glasnow. Over his last three outings, Aug. 9, Aug. 14, and Aug. 20, his swinging-strike rate has sat at 14.29%, 16.25%, and 13.89%, a clear step up from a season-long average that hovered in the 8-9% range across 25 appearances. Each of those three outings has also been notably shorter than his typical stint earlier in the year, 2.1 innings, 3.1 innings, and 4.0 innings respectively, which tracks with a pitcher whose stuff is playing up in shorter bursts rather than stretched across a traditional start.
His most recent outing, on Aug. 20, produced four innings, three runs (only one earned), four hits, a walk, and six strikeouts on 71 pitches, with 10 whiffs generated along the way. Unfortunately, the pitch tracking on that particular start did not hold up, so there is not much granular detail to lean on beyond the box score and the broader trend, but the trend itself is the story. This is a 23-year-old with zero industry helium quietly running his best swing-and-miss stretch of the season at the exact moment his role has changed.
He is still stretched out as a starter even with the recent piggyback usage, so dynasty managers should not reclassify him as a reliever just because his last three outings have looked more like relief appearances. What has changed here is not the pitcher. It is the role, and the role seems to be unlocking something that a traditional workload was not. That is worth filing away on a pitcher this unheralded, because arms that spike results the moment usage shifts are exactly the kind of profile that gets overlooked until it does not. Factor in that he is only 23, and the Dodgers pitching lab might have another quietly found gem on its hands.
2026 Stats: 15 GS | 62.0 IP | 3.48 ERA | 4.01 FIP | 24.3% K% | 8.8% BB% | 27.7% CSW%
Last Week: 5.0 IP | 1.80 ERA | 3 H | 1 ER | 0 BB | 4 K
Three weeks ago, Mason Adams was a White Sox farmhand still finding his footing back from Tommy John surgery, navigating an up-and-down summer at Triple-A Charlotte that included both some of his best starts of the year and one of the worst outings any pitcher will turn in all season. Then the Colorado Rockies made him the headline return in one of deadline day’s trades, sending two-time Gold Glove center fielder Brenton Doyle to Chicago for Adams and 16-year-old infield prospect Carlos Vielma. New organization, new ballpark, immediately.
Adams began his year in rookie ball on May 18, working back from surgery, then ran through four tidy High-A starts before a June 12 promotion to Triple-A Charlotte. Two clean scoreless outings followed, five innings each, before June 30 happened: 1.2 innings, seven runs, all earned, two home runs allowed against Memphis, by far his worst start of the season. He answered with a scoreless outing five days later, but the command wobbled again down the stretch, four walks on July 28 and two more on Aug. 2 in his final start before the trade, both outings where his swinging-strike rate dipped into the mid-single digits, easily his flattest stretch of the year.
None of that carried over to Albuquerque. Adams was traded Aug. 3 and made his first start for the Isotopes five days later: four innings, zero runs, three hits, one walk, five strikeouts, and a 16.2% swinging-strike rate, comfortably his best whiff number since a strong run back in mid-June. He followed with a slightly bumpier outing on Aug. 14, two runs allowed with two walks, before returning to form on Aug. 20 with five innings, one run, and zero walks, the cleanest start of his season by that measure. Across his three outings in a Rockies uniform, Adams has thrown 13 innings, allowed three earned runs, walked three, struck out 13, and, most notably, has not given up a single home run.
That zero matters more than it might for a different kind of pitcher. Adams tops out around 91 mph and has always leaned on a deep mix, a four-seamer, curveball, cutter, sweeper, changeup, and sinker, rather than pure velocity, which is exactly the profile evaluators worried would not hold up once he left Charlotte for the thin air of the Mountain time zone. SI’s Rockies coverage wondered directly how a deception-over-stuff arm handles Coors Field. Fair questions, and ones that a three-start sample in Albuquerque, not even Denver yet, does not fully answer.
What the early return does show is a pitcher who looked shaky in his final two starts with his old organization and has looked composed in all three with his new one. The called-strike-plus-whiff rate has climbed in each of his three Rockies outings, 26.47%, then 30%, then 32.35%, a real trend line in the right direction. The Coors Field test is still coming. The early answer to the more general question, whether Adams can hold his stuff together in this new environment, has been yes so far, and the June 30 disaster feels like a long time ago.
