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)
Jurrangelo Cijntje, St. Louis Cardinals
2026 Stats: 22 GS | 104.2 IP | 5.33 ERA | 4.89 FIP | 28.5% K% | 12.3% BB% | 30% CSW%
Last Two Weeks: 11.0 IP | 2.38 ERA | 5 H | 3 ER | 4 BB | 18 K
The St. Louis Cardinals trading away utilityman Brendan Donovan to Seattle this past February looks better and better, especially with the draft pick compensation and switch-pitcher Jurrangelo Cijntje, the most unique arm in their farm system. The headliner of that return, Cijntje is a true switch-pitcher, working almost entirely from the right side but still selectively mixing in left-handed looks when the matchup calls for it below Triple-A. Only one other pitcher, Pat Venditte, has carried that trick into affiliated baseball in the modern era, and Cijntje once looked like the next pitcher to take it further. But his best potential rides on his right arm, where he has a better arsenal and more command of it.
Cijntje’s 5.04 ERA in 17 Double-A starts for Springfield undersold him from the jump in 2026. He posted a 4.41 ERA over his final 10 starts at that level, then a 3.92 mark across his final 20.2 innings, striking out 26 batters in his last four outings alone. That trend earned him a July 12 promotion to Triple-A Memphis, and he has kept climbing since. His most recent outing was the best of his professional career, with a career-high 11 strikeouts and season-high-tying 17 whiffs through 6.1 innings against Durham, working almost exclusively right-handed. He issued his first walk of the night on the final pitch of the seventh, then showed visible discomfort near his right hamstring, prompting a mound visit from Memphis manager Ben Johnson and the team’s athletic trainer. It is the one worry attached to an otherwise sterling month.
The Triple-A numbers back up the eye test. Cijntje has struck out 42.9% of the batters he has faced this month, with a 0% barrel rate allowed and a .162 slugging percentage against. His slider, sitting 85.4 mph, has been nearly unhittable, carrying a .091 slugging percentage against on the pitch. The one number worth monitoring is his four-seamer, which is missing more bats than most fastballs at 95.5 mph but has also allowed a 15.4% barrel rate, the highest of any pitch in his mix. That is a small crack in an otherwise solid profile, and precisely the kind of detail that will matter more as he climbs.
As a baseball fan, it would be fun if Cijntje could make the every-batter-a-different-hand switch-pitcher starter work. That was always the best-case outcome. But after some severe relief worry this offseason, he looks like a much more viable starter in the Cardinals system. His season numbers will not look pretty after a rough start, but at 23 years old, there is little reason to think he is behind the curve of becoming an MLB starter in the near future for St. Louis.
I couldn’t just keep it to one Top 100 Spotlight this iteration, after a trio of starts from one Baltimore Orioles prospect gave dynasty managers a solid beginning to his Triple-A curve.
Luis De León, Baltimore Orioles
2026 Stats: 22 GS | 95.1 IP | 4.53 ERA | 3.13 FIP | 27.1% K% | 11.1% BB% | 31% CSW%
Last Two Weeks: 14.1 IP | 5.65 ERA | 20 H | 9 ER | 5 BB | 15 K
The Orioles do not have a strong habit of unearthing starting rotation help from the international free agent market, but Luis De León is their best recent chance of turning that around. Baltimore signed the lefty for just $30,000 out of Barahona, Dominican Republic in December of 2021, well after his signing class had already come and gone. Four years later, he is the club’s sixth or seventh prospect depending on which outlet you ask, and he just earned a promotion to Triple-A Norfolk.
De León’s Double-A season had a rough patch buried in an otherwise excellent year; his ERA ballooned to 6.80 after one disastrous outing before he settled in and dominated the rest of the way. Over his final eight starts for Chesapeake, he posted a 1.80 ERA, and in four July starts alone he went 3-0 with a 0.73 ERA, striking out 28 batters in 24.2 innings while limiting opponents to a .148 average. High-A pitching coach Jordie Henry, who has worked with nearly every top arm to pass through the Orioles’ system in recent years, put it simply: “De León is Mr. Tranquilo. Cool, calm, collected all the time. Doesn’t really get rattled.”
That poise has been tested early at Triple-A. De León is running a .350 average and .525 slugging percentage against in a small sample, with his signature sinker, the pitch that helped him post a 56.9% groundball rate and go the entire 2025 season without allowing a home run, getting hit around at a .577 slugging clip. Thankfully, his expected wOBA sits 110 points below his actual mark against, which tells you the underlying quality of contact has not been nearly as bad as the results suggest. Some sequencing and a small sample are doing a lot of the damage.
De León turned heads last year with a strong finish after an aggressive promotion to Double-A in his age-22 season. Now a calendar year later, can he replicate that after a trio of varying starts at Triple-A? It will be tough in the batter-friendly International League, but De León at least has the chance to recapture the prospect profile that made him an underrated aggressive buy last winter. Getting Triple-A batters to chase his slider and changeup will be harder, but iron sharpens iron.
Triple-A Standouts
Ryan Gallagher, Minnesota Twins
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
Ryan Gallagher had a tumultuous time at UC Santa Barbara, with Big West honors sandwiching a lost season due to Tommy John surgery. But the Chicago Cubs drafted him in the sixth round two years ago, then the Minnesota Twins picked him up last summer in the Willi Castro trade, a deal that has quietly worked out well for the Twins on both ends. Like De León, the season-level numbers are not pretty or screaming prospect worthy of dynasty managers’ attention, but the second-half performance is strong for Gallagher.
His first exposure to Triple-A came with real turbulence. After building a track record as a strike-thrower at every level below it, Gallagher’s walk rate spiked to 13% following his promotion, a sharp and uncharacteristic departure from what got him there. He has answered that stretch in the best way possible since the All-Star break, posting a 2.49 ERA and 2.91 FIP across four starts, capped by his best outing of the season: six innings, three hits, one run, one walk, and nine strikeouts. Gallagher’s fastball will not jump off the page, sitting in the low 90s, but the four-pitch mix behind it, headlined by a changeup that gets nearly 15 mph of separation off his heater, has always given him a chance to start.
The current stretch of Triple-A data backs up the turnaround. Gallagher has struck out 38.1% of batters faced with a 4.8% walk rate in August, and his actual and expected wOBA are separated by essentially nothing, .187 to .185, which tells you this version of him is earning every bit of it. Evaluators have floated a Simeon Woods Richardson comparison for the general shape of his profile, a low-90s fastball from a high release point, but with the belief that Gallagher’s secondaries and his added physical projection give him a real path to a back-end rotation role rather than a multi-inning relief fallback.
The Twins are trending out of the playoff conversation, sitting five games below .500 at August’s midway point. Minnesota has several young arms leading the rotation right now, trying to fill Joe Ryan’s shoes after he landed on the IL. If the Twins want to reset a Connor Prielipp or rest a Zebby Matthews, there are worse options than bringing up Gallagher. But with his remaining year until Rule 5 eligibility and a prospect profile that lacks the potency to force the Twins’ hand, Minnesota may slow-roll the southpaw until 2027.
2026 Stats: 19 GS | 91.2 IP |4.12 ERA | 3.99 FIP | 27.7% K% | 4.8% BB% | 29% CSW%
Last Week: 10.2 IP | 2.53 ERA | 8 H | 3 ER | 1 BB | 13 K
Gage Ziehl has already been traded twice before his 23rd birthday, first from the Yankees to the White Sox in the deal that sent Austin Slater to New York, then from Chicago to Boston this past February in the trade that shipped Jordan Hicks and David Sandlin the other direction. Three organizations in just over a year is an unusual amount of movement for a fourth-round college arm, but Ziehl has answered every promotion with the same trait: he simply does not walk anybody.
Ziehl’s full Double-A season for Portland ended with an unremarkable 4.33 ERA, but the underlying numbers told a much better story. Among qualified Eastern League starters, he ranked first in both walk rate (5.1%) and walks per nine (2.00), while sitting top five in strikeout rate (27.1%) and xFIP (3.51). He capped that run with a 1.93 ERA over his final three Double-A starts before earning a promotion to Triple-A Worcester, where his debut was about as clean as a debut can get: 5.2 scoreless innings, two hits allowed, eight strikeouts, and zero walks.
The pitch mix is the separator here. Ziehl works with five distinct offerings, a changeup, sweeper, four-seamer, cutter, and sinker, none of which are individually overpowering but which combine to give hitters a genuinely difficult puzzle to solve. In his current sample, his changeup has been the one pitch getting hit hard, a .500 slugging percentage against on a small number of balls in play, a number that stands in contrast to his track record of missing bats with the pitch all season. Everywhere else, the profile has been close to untouchable: a 2.5% walk rate in this window, a 32.5% strikeout rate, and just a 2.5% barrel rate allowed.
Ziehl is not going to dazzle anyone with pure stuff; his fastball sits in the low 90s, and evaluators generally see a back-end starter or bulk reliever as his likely outcome rather than a frontline arm. But pitchers who throw this many strikes with this many distinct pitch shapes tend to move quickly and tend to stick, and Boston’s ability to get Hicks’ payroll out of town while getting a high-floor prospect back deserves some props.
