[SPEAKER_02]: Hey everybody, Jay Jay Cooper, Jeff Ponds here, another baseball America prospect podcast, and let's tell you, this one, this one's going to be kind of the one for us podcast, where Jeff and I like to talk pitching a lot that's something that we both kind of, several things in common, but we both loved it as kind of think about pitching, talk to people about pitching, analyze pitching, watch a lot of pitching.
[SPEAKER_02]: So today we're going to talk about pitching, and
[SPEAKER_02]: We're gonna get geeky with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not going to just stick with this as a fast fall and this is what a change up looks like.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, we wanna talk about kind of, one of the things we wanna talk about today are, well, at least that I wanna talk about.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll let Jeff kind of talk about his part that he wants to talk about, but for me, I wanna talk about things that I used to think were true and have come to realize that are not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: And there are other things that I thought were not true and maybe they are true.
[SPEAKER_02]: To give an example that we're not gonna dive into,
[SPEAKER_02]: I started baseball America in 2002 and for the first 10 years, that was at baseball America.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was pretty much a hard and fast rule.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are a lot of things that you could do in pitching, but
[SPEAKER_02]: couldn't change arm actions, changing arm actions could basically but as described as you giving someone an artificial heart, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Where, okay, if the patient is basically dead on the table, maybe we'll do it, but the risk of it are so severe that it's just not worth doing otherwise.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then we caught the Nalukas Gielito and some others showed up and we're like, hey, I'm completely changing our arm action and it
[SPEAKER_02]: took help them take off as pictures become much better pictures they were.
[SPEAKER_02]: And before long we're like, oh, that's something you want to do all the time, but changing arm actions, how long you are in the back, some pictures went from really long to basically almost barely just bow and arrowing it.
[SPEAKER_02]: that or changing release points, which is something that we see kind of more often now, those things are changed.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those are not what we're going to dive into.
[SPEAKER_02]: But those are examples of kind of some of the things that that we've learned and that we've heard from a lot of very smart people in baseball and that we kind of wanted to share today.
[SPEAKER_02]: So great to see a Jeff, I know that you have been
[SPEAKER_02]: Just tack before we dive in, like this will be down the road coming at baseball America.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure we'll talk about on the podcast too, but share what you've been doing Speaking of pitching over the last stop few days.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so it was on vacation last week, so I did take some some time off, I watched mostly majorly games instead of minor league games, which was kind of refreshing honestly, much better defense and you know, it's that time of year where I feel like big inning is really great because
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you can watch a lot of young pictures that have come up over the last couple of weeks.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, making their second, third, four stars, guys like Nolan McLean, Peyton, totally.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even Jacob is your askie who's sort of no longer a prospect, but obviously, you know, is always an exciting watch and, you know, still somebody that up until very recently was on our lists.
[SPEAKER_03]: But in my free time, and when I had time to kind of kick around, I did sort of dig in and kind of dig in deep on a lot of different pictures, most of the guys that I've looked at so far, like top 100 guys, but my hope is over the next couple of weeks to kind of maybe look at the top, to say like 50 or 60 or so starting pitching prospects that we have in our top 30s that are still in the minors.
[SPEAKER_03]: I removed all the drafts because there's not really a whole lot that I can evaluate on those guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: A few of them are pitching, but I don't think Liam Doyle will over a couple of starts in Springfield.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really going to tell me a whole lot that I didn't already know.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, how those guys show up next year is going to be a big deal.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, kind of dug in on those guys, stayed away from some of the guys that have majorly made major league debuts.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of the hurt guys and there's a lot of guys in our top 100 pitching wise that have either pitched in the big leagues were recent drafts or hurt.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's kind of interesting going through some of those top names and even some of the guys like just outside the list.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I kind of like just like to dig in and when you have some time right now, we have this sort of month where, you know,
[SPEAKER_03]: We hate to say it, but it's kind of a dead period a little bit for my only baseball where there's playoffs, but some seasons are winding down right now.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have a lot of guys who like their years pretty much over, we do have AFL coming up in a month, but most of the focus now, I think when it comes to baseball fandom, is really focused on the major leagues, focus on the playoffs, and maybe a couple of these playoffs series, and some of the higher levels still wrap it up.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's a great time to maybe dig in deep on.
[SPEAKER_03]: pitching or something you even want to spend a little extra time on and we have all these resources available and a lot of these numbers are kind of final now so you can you know take them beyond just like a small sample size that you know most of the stuff that you're looking at is normalized and you can even maybe even pick out trends that happen throughout a season.
[SPEAKER_03]: So with all the video, all the data, all the information we have available are kind of figured
[SPEAKER_03]: Why not take this time and dig in some pitching and have some more formulated informed opinions on all these guys?
[SPEAKER_02]: So what we're going to do, we're going to let this conversation kind of take it where I want to take it, but we do have some topics, I'm kind of starting points we have, and a lot of those are going to be things that we're going to start with kind of things that we've either discovered through the years, learn through the years, or in some cases things that we thought we knew and I guess that brought up, you know, arm actions for one, but that's where I wanted to kind of start with this, which is,
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to start by saying, like, if you follow me on social media, you probably have picked up that I do believe that velocity is important.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, I know that there is a subset of baseball fans out there who really wish it wasn't true.
[SPEAKER_02]: They would love to think, you know, or hope that it could be something where pictures could pitch and they would need to throw hard and that you could do the craft of pitching and all that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Physics or physics, and you've never, I've never talked to, I mean, I know that there are hitters who say that they can catch up to premium velocity in the can, especially if your bat's really fast.
[SPEAKER_02]: But throwing harder is harder to hit than throwing softer.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's just, it's the way it's always been.
[SPEAKER_02]: But with that, when I started baseball America, the idea was, you either had velocity or you didn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: and not that you wouldn't see natural maturation.
[SPEAKER_02]: This thought something where he said if a pitcher was through 88 as a 18 year old that that same pitcher was gonna throw 88 as a 25 year old.
[SPEAKER_02]: But with that pitcher through 92 as a 25 year old, that would be viewed as the pitcher filled out as he got stronger, he would add velocity naturally.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think really you get to about 2010 or so.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you start to get to the point where
[SPEAKER_02]: weighted ball research, kind of some of the shoulder strengthening that was started with being done not to add velocity, but to reduce shoulder injuries, which it did a good job of, like these targeted strengthening exercises to improve the strength of the muscles surrounding, you know, the shoulder, the muscles there to ensure that you would not have the weakness in the
[SPEAKER_02]: And things that really have been devastating to pictures, which we are not completely out of the woods on shoulder injuries, but we see far fewer shoulder injuries than we did kind of in the early 2000s go back and look at
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got the handbooks there.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you look at the reds list from anywhere from like 2001, two, three, four, and you could almost like just go to any picture on there and it's like, what happened to him?
[SPEAKER_02]: His career was derailed by shoulder injury.
[SPEAKER_02]: Chris Grouler, you know, being the tie-howing tin, I could just go down a list of them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like it used to be a real problem, and it kind of got away.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Jeff, like, we're now in the era where I would say we very much have seen that,
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're a pitcher who throws strikes and you want to be a pro pitcher and you're 91, 92, 93, rise or write handler, let's say.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you've conspended a little bit, you can locate all that.
[SPEAKER_02]: The biggest thing that you have to do now is, hey, I'm gonna have to figure out how to have velocity and we've seen over and over.
[SPEAKER_02]: We have a better idea of the industry as a whole has a better idea of how to improve mechanics to generate that velocity and how to train to generate that velocity.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like that's something where nowadays, I don't think that if it used to be when I started at BA, there was belief that velocity was something that you either were born with or not.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now Velocity is very much, I would say that there is a carrying capacity that different pictures have.
[SPEAKER_02]: If your body's not strong enough, you may exceed the red line for your arm.
[SPEAKER_02]: And again, we don't want to say that there are not injury risks involved with throwing harder, because throwing harder adds stress, especially right there to the pitching elbow ligament.
[SPEAKER_02]: However, I don't think there's even a question nowadays about that anyone really debates
[SPEAKER_02]: organizations, training facilities, have learned how to help pictures increase velocity.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think, you know, the results have played out this way, particularly over the last.
[SPEAKER_03]: six to seven years now because I think even five is probably, you know, two recent for one this really took shape.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think we even see certain organizations now to where, you know, they get their hands on a particular picture and very clearly, I think, across the industry, we get feedback like,
[SPEAKER_03]: Kate and Toli is the kind of guy who's going to add velocity.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's got this big body.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's very physical.
[SPEAKER_03]: He moves very well.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's just some mechanical stuff to clean up and you know, I think even beyond sort of the stuff that's discussed publicly like, you know, they used to call it the gas camp or whatever it was, but the offseason Mariners camp or they all added velocity.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, we're seeing like that you went there and you came out the other side of the assembly line with an extra three miles an hour.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but I think even beyond that, it's not just it's like eat good food, lift big weight, get strong.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like not even that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like it's much more complicated than that in the sense that these biomechanical markers and
[SPEAKER_03]: certain sort of, you know, trunk positioning things that are beyond my comprehension because I've never worked with athletes in a 101 basis, you know, that were in little league pitchers.
[SPEAKER_03]: So like it's it's like I don't have a concept of like even how advanced it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: Beyond knowing the things that when you get into conversations with the people who are, you know, hands in the clay boots on the ground, that's the sort of stuff that they have access to and they work with.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they recognize and are able to make those tweaks that then show up in another couple inches of ride or maybe more velocity or better deception, right, it's all those sort of things and I think it's done it well when you talked about like arm angle being one.
[SPEAKER_03]: or even your action, your slot, or shortening up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we've seen Lucas Gielito sort of found another gear in his career going from a longer arm action, a little moderate, to a very small one.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we see different examples of all these little tweaks throughout the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the operation, it could be grips, it could be how the arm moves, it could be the legs or the trunk and and just even posture is could be a big part of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's all these things that can tweak other little elements and I think the other part of it that we have now.
[SPEAKER_03]: that maybe we didn't is, it's not just having an understanding or recognizing all the elements that matter for a successful picture, but having the ability to have some sort of benchmarks or markers to sort of evaluate those characteristics from, which I think is very different from even what we did have even five years ago, because more and more that information becomes prevalent.
[SPEAKER_03]: more people that were in these spaces and in these conversations behind closed doors with organizations then become public or share the information with a public and we have a lot more high-level discussions about pitching them a booster.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I would also say with it like to give an example like you talk about mechanics.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't remember the first time that I heard the words lead leg block, you know, which is to try to simplify and dumb it down is when we talk about this, it's like the chain of energy, you know, drive line was talking about, you know, started with kind of hacking the kinetic chain.
[SPEAKER_02]: There were one of the groups that was kind of studying this, but.
[SPEAKER_02]: you're trying to get your energy all into your arm at the right point.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that doesn't just involve your arm, involve your legs, it involves your trunk, your torso, everything all leading up to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And part of that is it's kind of throwing into resistance in some ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's something where it's not something where you just think about being just
[SPEAKER_02]: free and easy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there are parts of the lead lead blocking with something that I think, you know, Dr Marshall was kind of in some way looking at 40 years ago.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like this was things where people are kind of work and things, but we've got a much better or we.
[SPEAKER_02]: The industry has a much bigger understanding of the now that it used to and allows the, you know, teams to do these kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is going to get me onto a little bit of a Degression and a rant that I'm sorry Jeff, you've heard me time and time again, but I'm just going to share it with everyone else because I still get people and they're citing my story to me, they're telling me
[SPEAKER_02]: that the velocity has an improved, velocity hasn't changed.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just that the radar guns are different now.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then they'll say, see, here's the story, which is a story that I wrote, and they're telling me that I'm just an idiot because I don't understand this.
[SPEAKER_02]: And let me just say, let me just try to clarify this.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you talk about the suitcase radar guns of 1978 to 1982 that a few scouts had not many but a few scouts had them and I'm talking the suitcase was the battery for it because you couldn't fit a battery to the radar gun in anything smaller than a suitcase of these are the, this is the, this is when the radar gun for baseball was less than a decade old right.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you brought one of those to a game, yes, it kind of registered it at the plate.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if you said, how does that compare to Hawkeye now?
[SPEAKER_02]: 78 miles an hour, maybe.
[SPEAKER_02]: But here's the thing with those.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those guns didn't say that guys were throwing, but for one, anyone telling this,
[SPEAKER_02]: find as someone who loves to go through archives of old baseball America issues and other baseball content.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got the scouting notebooks from the e-news down there.
[SPEAKER_02]: One thing that stands out about that for one is
[SPEAKER_02]: If you talk about velocity in the early 80s, often it doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_02]: You don't have a record of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not saying that there's not, maybe sometimes a record on scanning for it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you get to the early 80s, there was still debate among scouts about whether you needed a radar gun or not.
[SPEAKER_02]: Though new scouts are like, radar guns good,
[SPEAKER_02]: And the old scouts were like, you don't need a radar gun, I've been using my eyes for 40 years.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why do I need to change?
[SPEAKER_02]: And the reason why you need to change is that it's helpful to be able to measure it because you may say that this is Heathrow's hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: And another scouts says Heathrow's hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're both right.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that guy throws three miles an hour harder than your hard because you're an different part of the country.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's different than just being able
[SPEAKER_02]: At that time, you don't see a whole lot of law streets.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are many prospect reports from baseball American the early 80s.
[SPEAKER_02]: This says, he has a good fastball.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's is the extent of the information about the fastball, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But you will see sometimes in the report this says, he throws 86 miles an hour on the slogan.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you saw that on the slogan, okay, that could be 92.93.
[SPEAKER_02]: miles an hour on Hawkeye, which we can call a fast gun.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's not what people are talking about, though.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're saying that the pictures who threw in the late 90s and the 2000s in the 2010s, they threw as hard as they do now, it's just being measured differently now.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, no!
[SPEAKER_02]: Stocker has been the main radar gun since the mid-90s.
[SPEAKER_02]: The stocker ones came out in the 90s.
[SPEAKER_02]: I found baseball America ads from like 1993 advertising stocker pro ones, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: They weren't in pro ones back then.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were to stocker pros.
[SPEAKER_02]: Stocker pro twos came out in the early 2000s.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's been the radar gun, a stocker one from 1998, 1995.
[SPEAKER_02]: One, if you want to be crazy, you could say two miles an hour different for a hot guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jeff, I will ask you, because I was going to say, I've used the same, and the three are going to technology.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know they have stocker threes now, but they're the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: They have some other additional factors.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I'm using a radar gun at the game, it is the same stocker two that I've been using for 15 years.
[SPEAKER_02]: and no one is using some newfangled radar gun that is different than that, sitting in the stands.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're all using those.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm talking literally the same radar gun that I was using 15 years ago, and we're seeing 100 miles an hour all the time now, and I never saw it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when people tell me, oh no, no, it's just because the velocity measurement is different now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm measuring the same way that I was measuring 15 years ago when I was driving all around the country trying to find a hundred miles an hour in person and see it for the first time and now I'll see it all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: I will stop ranting and just see if you have any thoughts before we move.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I've had a stalker pro to at plus.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't have to ask to have the spin gun, but it's the one that that can be the only difference is it can like,
[SPEAKER_03]: transferred like wirelessly information, which I've never used.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I bought that gun in 2019.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I got my first 100 in Worcester.
[SPEAKER_03]: in 2021.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got 99s and I had been to the fall league.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had seen the Cape for a couple years with that gun.
[SPEAKER_03]: I had gone to minor league games in the Tucket and Woll and Portland and New Hampshire and Hartford seen all types of games and then I really started to consistently get
[SPEAKER_03]: probably in like spring training of 2022, I got a lot more just even on like random backfield games and then started seeing it way more consistently.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, in in in in season games in 2022, I probably saw three or four five guys that hit 100 miles an hour like I look back on in that gun and the gun runs probably a little slow like versus trackman or Hawkeye will be like a mile mile and a half sometimes too.
[SPEAKER_03]: But there's also.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's also the human error in terms of like my arm and like where I'm actually pointing it versus Hawkeye, which is consistently picking it up at the right spot all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's more accuracy to it too.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think that might be part of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I know I think I've seen guys just over the last three or four years.
[SPEAKER_03]: seem to throw a lot harder.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's way more common now as someone who went to minor league games, my whole life, and probably saw a radar gun for at least the last 10, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like at least in terms of the board or whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's way more common now to just see a random guy come out of the bullpen that throws a hundred miles an hour.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, if you sit in the series in any double a park, there's a good chance there might be a couple of guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: that throw 100 miles an hour.
[SPEAKER_03]: And some of them aren't just relievers.
[SPEAKER_03]: Some of them are starters.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like you could see, you know, Carlos Lagrange, and he throws 100 miles an hour all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: You could see Harlan Susana.
[SPEAKER_03]: He throws 100 miles all the time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Brody Hopkins can hit 100 miles an hour.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you pain or can hit 100 miles an hour.
[SPEAKER_03]: Boba Chandler can hit 100.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jacob, Miss Yorowski,
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, Beethoven totally isn't a 100-year-old.
[SPEAKER_03]: Touch 98 is a lefty and is, is an MLB debut.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, Brandon Sprote, another guy that's hit 100 miles an hour.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are so many starters who hit 100 now.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's even more of a case for this, because you might see the offer leader.
[SPEAKER_03]: You might see Pat Light hit 100 miles an hour, which I think is the first time I ever saw someone in person through 100.
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't have a radar gun and it was up on the board and in the tuck it, I see that all the time now from guys that started.
[SPEAKER_03]: That have movement and command.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the other part of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I would say that there are on average.
[SPEAKER_02]: pen pictures per organization now in the minors not the majors but in the minors in a given year who are 99 plus who can touch 99 plus like your average organization has 10 of those yeah and I would say it used to be like I do not look up the reliever comes in and they like their first pitch is 97 98 now it's just like that's just that is just what we're seeing I remember
[SPEAKER_02]: being at A ball games, if a reliever came in and they through 97, I was stopping what I was doing to pay attention because that was like, I would not see that again for weeks.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now, I knew that that was a dude.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, if you through 97, like that, you're a dude.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now you are just one of every.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think like that's still the case when I'm on the cape.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's one of the fun things about being there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there still like a level of finding stuff?
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe not against the industry because all those guys obviously have been found enough to go to the cape.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, you get a guy from a small school that comes out and hits a 97 or a 98 or a sitting 95, 96.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then that's like kind of exciting.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you're like, wow, this might be something.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a little more rare there.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I mean, if I'm in double A and a guy hits 100, it's like, yeah, but like what it says, release characteristics like, like, does he have a secondary?
[SPEAKER_03]: How frequently does he land it in the zone?
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I think that's a big part of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I was looking at Carlos the Grange today as someone asked the bottom in the week the hot sheet chat and it was like, do you think he's a reliever?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I said, it depends to you talk to you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because some people internally might think he falls in the reliever side.
[SPEAKER_03]: I tend to feel like he's more of a starter.
[SPEAKER_03]: You look at the body, how many innings he's thrown.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you dig into the actual zone rates because we have in zone rates for all these different pitches.
[SPEAKER_03]: over, you know, all the games leading up to the beginning of September, um, he hasn't above average zone rating as fast ball on his breaking balls.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really only the change up and that's very fringy and most changeups tend to have a sub 40 percent zone rate.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I tend to look at a guy like that or a guy like Harlan Suzon and say there aren't many guys that can hold this kind of stuff and throw this many strikes with that big a stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, so it's, it's crazy because now we have starters that that do this in the miners, where, you know, if you had maybe one or two guys who did that in the majors, five or six years ago, that was a big deal.
[SPEAKER_03]: Now it feels like we have prospects.
[SPEAKER_03]: We have guys that might sit 100 in college next year, you know, with Jack Bauer, making it to campus, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that's a strong possibility next year.
[SPEAKER_03]: We have Paul schemes, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, there's just so many guys that sit 100 miles an hour that
[SPEAKER_03]: Just seem completely impossible back in the early 90s when it was Roger Clemens and David Cone and some of those guys who were the hardest throws in the game.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, that's that that ended up I knew those was would be ended up being longer than we planned, but that one went longer my plan was probably because I get a little rant about this, but this is now.
[SPEAKER_02]: I want us to get to a point that Jeff has made that I think is an interesting one.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this one, if you thought that was a little geeky, buckle up, cause this one, this one's really geeky.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're gonna do that right after this quick break.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're back.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Jeff, one of the things that you've talked about, when we talk about fastball change up interactions,
[SPEAKER_02]: You've come to a realization on that, I think, in some ways, and talking to people about the realization that they have as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: So take it away.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, you know, I think when we look at change ups, it's different than other pitches.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's one of the reasons it's stuff models, almost don't matter, I'm change ups.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I know they've tried to make some adjustments for things like this, but the numbers never totally drive.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's because it's a pitch that,
[SPEAKER_03]: rarely sort of stands on its own, that's not to say that there aren't changeups in history, like, you know, Devon Williams when, you know, his airbender resettits peak or, you know, Trevor Hoffman's changeup and some of these young, yeah, they can stand in their own.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's certainly some of those, you know, and I think, Roki Sasaki's probably listening to this and saying, yes, the only way I can be successful is if you
[SPEAKER_03]: My splitter can say it out of its own, but, you know, I think we too often kind of don't pay attention to how it plays off of the fastball and the biggest thing I think even more than the loss of the separation, which was, which was always something that historically we kind of picked up on and harped on as soon as we had radar guns on television broadcasts, we could watch Johann Santana and say, wow, is 11 miles per hour or whatever it is on average.
[SPEAKER_03]: separation between that fastball and the change up.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think more so than even that, while that velocity can certainly help if it's sold and, you know, it comes out of the similar slot, it's the separation between the ride on the fastball and the plane that that creates, and then the lack of ride,
[SPEAKER_03]: on a change up and the plane that that creates, and especially if it's coming out of the hand the same way, they often look like the same sort of pitch, and then, you know, at whatever point it sort of deviates and breaks, but, you know, just even the movement, um,
[SPEAKER_03]: can look very similar and it's just a matter of it sort of bottoming out kind of late if you typically look at change ups, you know, it's not killing a lift like immediately out of the hand.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think that's really really important to sort of look at and
[SPEAKER_03]: There was an article, you know, years ago, a prospects live with, you know, a bunch of guys that now work for teams kind of describing tunneling.
[SPEAKER_03]: And a big part of that conversation was sort of how the VAAs play it against each other, you know, between forcing fastballs and changeups.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think you tended to see like when I look at which changeups miss the most bats in the minor leagues.
[SPEAKER_03]: They tend to have it minimum of two degrees separation between the VAA, which is the plane, on the foreseen fastball, and then the VAA, the plane on the change up.
[SPEAKER_03]: If it's two and a half to three, those tend to really, really play.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think a perfect example this year was like Jonathan.
[SPEAKER_03]: The difference in his VAA and his foreseen fastball, which gets a lot of
[SPEAKER_03]: And then on his change up, once he changed his grip, that really played against each other because, you know, he sort of doesn't generate a whole ton of like arms that I had run.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know there was four seam, you know, or on the change up, but being able to sort of stretch that vertical break out of a sort of a similar hand position and release point allowed it to really play.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's ultimately
[SPEAKER_03]: a big part of what deception is beyond how well you hide the ball.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think, you know, if you can watch sort of the path of the ball and how well it travels, it may not matter how much separation you have on two different pitches, just because the eyes of professional hitters and their ability to pick up on those sort of things and really follow that ball and time it.
[SPEAKER_03]: By the point they get to the big leagues, they get to the upper minors, they have so much experience
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really important, you know, part of it is deception.
[SPEAKER_02]: Can I offer like a slight tweak to that?
[SPEAKER_02]: I agree with you, but I would also say with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I see all those two are very interrelated as well though, right, which is what you're trying to do, as we've talked about before on on the pot I think, and we talk about visual chunking, like the the hitter is extrapolating where it believes the ball will end up.
[SPEAKER_02]: because he's seeing pitches like this before.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the more that you are unlike what the pit, the batter is seen before, the better you're going to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: When you talk about ride, and then you talk about the separation, the vertical separation of the change up, what we're really kind of saying with that is, the batter is expecting the fastball to be lower than it ends up being.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the fastball gets above his bat.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the change up is getting up lower than anything, so it's getting below the bat.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I would also say, if you throw into that, the velocity separation as well, that component.
[SPEAKER_02]: So now, I'm managing to mess with the hitter in two different ways at the same time, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Which is, I'm messing, like you said, there are hitters were really good at this with timing.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if I, the more confusion I can create the better, so if I'm managing to both create confusion as far as where the intercept point's gonna be higher low,
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm able to create confusion, which I think that this when we talk about stuff models and all one of the things I've never gotten around a writing and I should have, but now we're having these kind of bat path tracking and all this, if you think of you can't think of all this in a two dimensional plane, you have to think about it in a three dimensional world, because I can be at the exact perfect location to put the sweet spot on the bat, exactly where the pitch is going to cross the plate, but if I'm.
[SPEAKER_02]: a couple of hundreds of seconds early or late with that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've also created a problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's where the velocity separation, the velocity deception, I guess, would say even more than separation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because like you said, if you're telegraphing it out of the hand, it doesn't matter if it's 12 miles an hour, if you can read it right on the hand.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if it looks like a fastball of the hand, then that can add to the confusion of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Which leads, I think, into our next point that kind of shared one that we love to talk about,
[SPEAKER_02]: you've talked about.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot to me that's really good to me about stuff models, but I would say that I'll throw it out to you and see what you think.
[SPEAKER_02]: Stuff models, they're trying to get more advanced about this, but if you look at any pitch in and think of it in a silo by itself,
[SPEAKER_02]: you're not getting the full effect of a pitcher's arsenal.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'd say that on the team side, we're kind of reverse engineering this that we can see more and more on the team side that teams are more and more focused on arsenals for a pitcher.
[SPEAKER_02]: And really now adding more pitches to a pitcher's basically toolbox.
[SPEAKER_02]: and saying that the interrelation between those pitches is often more important than the characteristics or the quality of any one pitch.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and I think, you know, how pitches play together, you know, Robby Snowing who I talked about earlier is kind of a perfect example.
[SPEAKER_03]: Really close sort of release heights on all of his pitches.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, the ability to play the game of sort of going east to west and north to south when needed and you know everything that that he does kind of plays really well together so there might be other pitchers who have better individual pitches more stuff more velocity more movement.
[SPEAKER_03]: and like in a vacuum, each one of those pitches could great out better, but in terms of how it all fits together, how it sold, how it comes out of the hand, the consistency of like your army at Angle and
[SPEAKER_03]: release point and you know, do you drop down when you throw your slider or this and like all that stuff really matters in terms of results and I think we see that sort of materialize and not just like with rates and swing rates, but but also chase rates like how frequently can you get somebody to
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, expand the zone when you just miss or you throw into that shadow area or, you know, maybe even just throw it kind of out of the zone.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, we see some very ugly swings against really good pitches once we get up to the majors, you know, and it's not just.
[SPEAKER_03]: Francisco Alvarez apparently unable to identify anything out of the hand like you did last night.
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, we see some ugly swings.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, pitching Ninja made an entire career out of sort of breaking down those swings just in the major leagues.
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, it's, it's kind of funny
[SPEAKER_03]: We see professional hitters look really stupid.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's because of the variety of things that happened before it, you know, how the first two or three pitches of a particular bat might play out or even previous debates against this guy and sort of what the looks are.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think there's so many little elements to all this stuff that, you know, how a picture kind of manipulates lands commands all of his different pitches within his arsenal and uses them situationally.
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, drive a lot of the results.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not just like throwing hard and getting ride and doing all these things.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like setting guys up in particular zones, knowing where to attack certain hitters, how to attack certain hitters.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I also think like when we're looking at pitching prospects,
[SPEAKER_03]: That tends to be the final finishing step that we'll see in AAA, where there's, there tends to be more advanced scouting reports, more preparation, more information and that goes on both sides.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we often see that take it other step forward in the big leagues and I think it's why, you know, some guys that maybe have.
[SPEAKER_03]: 50 grade stuff perform better as starters when they get all these extra tools and pieces of information because they can adapt and they have the pitch ability element and like you know a little more cerebral about how they approach the day to day.
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, then some guy who has 60 or 70 stuff, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: There's there's a lot of starters who were ranked not as highly and didn't have the sort of blow you away stuff that Michael Copek had in the minors, you know, found a lot more success as starters.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think we just consistently see that and I think it's one of the things that makes breaking down pitching so
[SPEAKER_03]: They can kind of, they're almost like gas where like they kind of like don't ever have a set shape, you know, it's, it's always kind of fluid doing it to an extent.
[SPEAKER_02]: an organization that really that kind of jumps out to me is the Astros organization that you cover for us but like the number of starters for the Astros who have six different pitches and again you can get into pitch classification when I say six normally often they'll have a sweeper, a slider and a cutter but a lot of times those are three distinct pitches for them and a you know forseemer and a sinker and a change up or sometimes they'll be a curveball and a slider and a sweeper
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have six pitches,
[SPEAKER_02]: Part of what you are trying to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're doing that to your starters, a larger, cross-reorganization, like if I go back with the Astros, if you say, what did the Astros do really well in the late 20 teens, you know, and back then, I would say that, okay, one, that really developed velocity.
[SPEAKER_02]: They had that, that was the organization.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was doing the Astros back then for us.
[SPEAKER_02]: And like the number of guys you'd write up with, when he signed, he threw 87.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now he's 96, you know, like they had a number of those guys.
[SPEAKER_02]: But on top of that,
[SPEAKER_02]: It was something where you kind of knew that they almost, and we're seeing this Detroit does this, I think the Tiger to this pretty well too, but like pictures who, they're this picture against the left-handed batter and this picture against the right-hand of batter.
[SPEAKER_02]: And to have it, it's a whole idea of making sure that you have plenty of weapons to handle either side pitters.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you're not just the same guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, okay, I throw my slider against the, you know, I'm a right-hander and I throw my slider to get right-handers out.
[SPEAKER_02]: and then I'll let you get to the plate and you go, okay, I really don't have a whole hour approach here.
[SPEAKER_02]: The, the, the Astros at the time we're going to be once like, no, you have a curve ball, you throw to them, you have a change up, you throw them, you have a fastball and you may never throw that curve ball, you know, it's a pretty platoon neutral pitch, but sometimes it'd be like, you're mainly throwing that against when you don't have a platoon advantage.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were arsenals, how these pitches all interplay, is really important.
[SPEAKER_02]: That leads, though, again, when we talk about how these things interplay, another one of yours, Jeff, which is, when we talk about extension, extension can be really important, and it can be absolutely unimportant.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is that a way to summarize kind of how you've kind of come to the point?
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's more, it's always important, but there's certain guys who can operate successfully without a lot of extension.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think generally the guys who have outlier extension
[SPEAKER_03]: they all tend to be pretty good.
[SPEAKER_03]: And some way shape or form.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's always been the selling point in a guy like Peyton told me that, he has this outlier extension, and that allows the fastball to play up and the velocity and everything outspool sort of come along with it.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's not too often that you see guys that are sort of outlier on that particular end that,
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, don't have some some level of success like and I think that you also can look at a lot of pictures like I think one in particular is like Chase Doleander who's, you know, had some struggles this year obviously his landing spot with the Rockies is certainly not the easiest of places, but the one concern that I had is he had sort of below average extension and
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know how much that's maybe played into him not having enough deception and being able to consistently create that outlier playing that he needs to succeed.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, I don't want to say that it's I feel like it's more important now than I think I thought three or four years ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: But there are certainly starters who have success without having like outlier extension.
[SPEAKER_03]: But guys who don't have enough extension, it does become a little bit of a concern.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think like Josh Norse had a great article today where he spoke with Thomas White last week, and White called out as lack of extension.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when I broke down White recently, that was one of the few concerns I had with White was, he doesn't generate as much extension as you would hope.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's other guys like Andrew Painter who generate zero extension,
[SPEAKER_03]: This might be kind of an issue and kind of why his fastball doesn't play the way we hope it would.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, now let me get even further geeky.
[SPEAKER_02]: When a pitcher doesn't have extension, what do you think that is?
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, I think it's just the operation.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's just, you know, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there's a fair amount of athleticism.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's where I was going to go.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was going to go to athleticism.
[SPEAKER_02]: It kind of tells me a little bit about the athlete.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, because I think like you look at some of the great athletes like Brody Hopkins is pretty good extension.
[SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't have outlier extension though.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, but it's not below average.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think those guys tend to move a little bit better get down the mound a little bit more.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, and.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I think their certain guys were maybe moderate athletes like gauge jump where it's kind of just their super power that they just do a really good job of getting down the mound even if there may be smaller more diminutive guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do think it helps everything sort of play up and I think it's a key component.
[SPEAKER_03]: more of a really successful forcing fastball pitcher, you know.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you maybe have less extension and you're a two-seem guy that can really make it dance east to west, like with your breaking ball and your change up, I think those guys can also be really successful.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just think more often than not, those guys, you know, need to have some variation of like out-generating characteristics of like they can get grounders, pop-ups with certain pitches, and get the whiffs
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're wondering like Jacob Isarowski, Extension King, Peyton Toli, who you just mentioned, Extension King.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bishop, let's send if you're looking for a pitcher's further away, Extension King.
[SPEAKER_02]: Those are guys who really do get down the mound now.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, again, like part of this also is is, you know, it being six foot eight, like if you're, you know, if you're a misarrowsky type, you just relative to height to like six foot three, six foot four is really good for five 11 six foot gauge jump, right.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, Jonah Tong, I think is maybe six, five, six, six.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jonah Tong is probably five, 10.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know where he might be listed.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's six, one.
[SPEAKER_03]: You saw him at the prospect pad.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't, he's not taller than I. Oh, big dude.
[SPEAKER_03]: And no one's ever listed me at six foot two.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, I think like all of that stuff is really relative to height two, which is why like, yeah, totally is six foot six.
[SPEAKER_03]: totally also creates seven and a half feet of extension on average.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's like, it's all relative.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're getting a bobbin' a foot from what your height is, that's really outlier.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, anyone who's over seven foot, unless you are, you better be, if you're not rainy Johnson's size, you're getting over seven feet of extension, is probably because you're getting really good extension.
[SPEAKER_02]: But, well, that leads to the final myth, which, again, I end up on velocity a lot, I know.
[SPEAKER_02]: one that I think blows people's minds when I tell them this everyone what everyone but a lot of people seem to think they think of velocity in pitching as kind of like it's something that comes with it's trade us and it does we talked about the risk of injury the risk of injury is real if you if you want to be perfectly healthy throw 80
[SPEAKER_02]: throw eight miles an hour to probably never blow out your other.
[SPEAKER_02]: You won't get it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You won't be employed in professional baseball, but you will, you will be able to throw to your kids and be safe and do that for the rest of your life.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you throw a hundred, you're going to, the risk is going to go way up, but you also have a much better chance of being employed by a professional team and compensated very highly to throw a baseball.
[SPEAKER_02]: The other trade-off that often is seen, and again, I get where this comes from.
[SPEAKER_02]: There is a kernel of truth here, which is, if you throw harder, you also lose the ability to throw strikes.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you want to throw strikes, I don't want to see it throwing 100, I want to see it throwing 90.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I say that that's not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now,
[SPEAKER_02]: There is a truth to if you have a max effort delivery where you're head walking, you know, you're steering, you know, at the ground when you're pulling your arm through and you're into a really stiff front side and you are really like you're doing everything, you know, like you're grunting as you throw it to the plate.
[SPEAKER_02]: then you may have more trouble repeating that delivery pitch after pitch, especially if you're asked to go 100 pitches rather than 20.
[SPEAKER_02]: Not saying that's not true.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a scouting axiom that's I think got a lot of validity to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we also know there are a whole lot of pitchers who they get stronger and they throw harder, but you know what also comes with that?
[SPEAKER_02]: because they're stronger, they're better able to maintain their mechanics even as they throw harder.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I say that because the strike percentage in the major leagues has gone up by 2% in the 21st century.
[SPEAKER_02]: At the start of the 21st century, major league pictures through strike 62% of the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now it's up right around 64%.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's below 62% of the
[SPEAKER_02]: Now it's about around 64%.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I know someone's going to say, because I've had people tell me, oh, that's just because these hitters nowadays, they swing at anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it's just on these, you know, they're getting more swinging strikes.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, the number of, if you track from 2007, we have the location of every major league pitch, basically from 2007 to present.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you look at the location of pitches in 2007, eight, nine, ten.
[SPEAKER_02]: There were more bad misses far from the strike zone, non-competitive pitches than there are now.
[SPEAKER_02]: There were fewer pictures on the edges of the zone than there are now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Pitchers are throwing the ball in the zone more and around the zone more than they did, even as we go back to my previous rat, even as they throw harder.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the thing I would say with that is though, is that there's another component to that,
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is where I'll kind of kick it to you for your thought's Jeff, the harder you throw, the easier it is to be in the zone because when I've watched pictures over the years, we can all try to romanticize the idea of the soft tossing left you throws 88 who is right just painting the black pitch after pitch.
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of times though, you can't be in the zone if you throw that kind of velocity because you know you'll get hit, whereas if you throw 100, you can be in the zone and you have a chance to generate swings and misses.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think a great example was a guy like breed and Davis from the Cardinals, who's been a pretty decent mover for them this year.
[SPEAKER_03]: A guy that was, I think it's Sam Houston State then ended up at Oklahoma his last year and the Cardinals draft him had a good summer in the Cape with Falmouth the handful years ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, for him it's funny because he's the kind of guy where I would put a higher grade on command being the ability to land as pitches to good locations where he's going to be the most successful like with purpose and intent.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I think that's kind of what command is where control is just simply like does he throw strikes does he throw enough strikes right and I think like that's the least in my opinion that's the defining the characteristic is between the two com terms and you know a guy like Davis sits
[SPEAKER_03]: 89, 91, 92, it's a little bit harder now, but he's always sort of had to live above the zone and steel strikes early and then sort of throw above the zone.
[SPEAKER_03]: But he has a very small sort of hot zone, kind of in that shadow zone at the very top of the zone where his forcing fastball is going to be most effective.
[SPEAKER_03]: And
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the same with his breaking ball.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not super hard, doesn't have a ton of crazy movement, but there's sort of a window glove side where it's most effective and that's whether he's throwing it to, you know, left-ears or throwing it to a right-ears, etc.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's then like really, really good change up and like everything plays off of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But those two other pitches,
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, if one was a 90 mile an hour slider and the other was a 97 mile per hour forcing fastball, he wouldn't have to land at those areas, he could more or less throw it center cut and tell guys to just try to come and hit it and.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, even if you didn't necessarily have, you know, particular command of like, where that's going to land.
[SPEAKER_03]: As long as it's in the zone or around the zone, if he's throwing that hard with a lot of movement, that's going to be an effective pitch.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think when you have this conversation of like, guys who throw harder,
[SPEAKER_03]: more often than not, have a lot more leeway within the zone to still be successful, where there's other guys where the Kyle Hendrix is et cetera, they have to be a little bit more tricky than Paul Schenz has to be.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say with that, when we talk about the injury risk with these pictures is thoroughly hard, there's a truth to that.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a risk with the guys who don't throw hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: Some of these craftsmen who are great at pitching, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: But you mentioned Kyle Hendrix and Kyle Hendrix has had a great career.
[SPEAKER_02]: But as much as we can talk about the injury risk for a pitcher who throws 102, there's also this kind of court, this kind of similar risk for the soft tossers where the margin that you have, like you just hit it, they're on a tightrope in a lot of ways, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're a pitcher like that and all of a sudden your location, your ability to command the pitch just takes a little bit of a step back and all of a sudden you start catching the plate A little bit more of that baseball than you want to you can get hit really hard or Aaron Noah who's kind of good start last night when we're recording this, but like Aaron Noah has been one of the better pitchers in national league or the last, you know, but decade now.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's been really bad for most of this year.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when you say like, he's still locating.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I've wrote a story earlier, it's like he is painting the very edges of the zone.
[SPEAKER_02]: He very rarely leaves a pitch center cut right in the middle of the zone here, T off on it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he lost like a mile and a half of velocity off of his pitches.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that just kind of took him from the right side of that
[SPEAKER_02]: and he was dotting right at the edge.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was working.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then all of a sudden when it became 90, 91, trying to dot it that edge, it was like, hitters were like, yep, I got time, I'm gonna hit it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you said, if you are sitting at 98, your margin of error is as I miss my spot with that pitch.
[SPEAKER_02]: But because you were aiming, like, a roleless Chapman, there was a story earlier this year that said that this is the first year that a role is Chapman, like, had a conversation with the catcher,
[SPEAKER_02]: And a small miss small and it's like, oh, I'm going to now at 37, 38 years old, I'm going to try to hit your glove rather than just try to hit the strike zone and kind of seem to unlock something new for Rollers Chapman, but Rollers Chapman did that as you're 16 I believe in the majors, 15, 16 the majors, and he's been really good all this time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why?
[SPEAKER_02]: If you throw 104,
[SPEAKER_02]: And you miss your spot and you end up to kind of middle of the zone.
[SPEAKER_02]: No one's like, hey, this is a cookie that I'm just going to crush.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's still 103.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's 104.
[SPEAKER_02]: So again, we could do this for hours, really.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we're going to try to limit it to an hour.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to slide over into our prospects, soap boxes, which is something that we do every week on this show.
[SPEAKER_02]: Where we talk about a non-top on a prospect.
[SPEAKER_02]: We want to make sure.
[SPEAKER_02]: Top Hunters updated, every, you know, we can check that out over at Baseball Market.com.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we also like talk about prospects outside of the top hundred.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jeff, you've got a good one, because you've been diving deep on pictures so far in the last couple of weeks on your quote, vacation last week.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, because we look at Baseball and our vacation's too, because we love Baseball.
[SPEAKER_02]: But so Jeff, who do you have as this week's prospects of bugs?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we're going to talk about a friend of B.A.
[SPEAKER_03]: Brody Hopkins as he's done multiple hot sheet shows this year was at the prospect pad hanging out for a little bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've talked with him quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was one of my favorite pictures kind of coming out of Wink for the draft few years ago ended up with the Mariners, which I thought was a great spot, ends up getting dealt to the rays and the Randy hours arena deal.
[SPEAKER_03]: the 2024 deadline and you know he's really expanded sort of who he is as a pitcher during his time with the race and you know he's throwing a couple of different sliders shapes now worked in a different change of grip that's been fairly effective but I think when you look at this guy at the end of the day it's foreseen fastball at the top of the zone you know the ability
[SPEAKER_03]: He creates really outlier plane.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's under a four degree VA, which is kind of in line with what makes Jake up to Grom's fastball.
[SPEAKER_03]: So unique kind of falls in line with that.
[SPEAKER_03]: He throws really hard as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: The command is still coming along.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the mechanics as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's fairly new to full-time pitching.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is only kind of his second full season as a full-time pitcher, FBN2A guy for most of his career in college.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think, you know, the big thing with him is his outlier curveball.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it's a pitch with not a crazy amount of drop, but a crazy amount of drop for how hard he throws it.
[SPEAKER_03]: He averages like 87 to 88 miles an hour on a curveball, and there's just not a lot of guys in baseball that can do that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really, really good pitch.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really good in every single kind of metric.
[SPEAKER_03]: He commands it better than any of his other secondarys as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: gets a lot of chase swings, gets a lot of whiffs, that in his fastball or key to his arsenal, but I look at a guy like him who's had some success who is this incredible athlete has always really interesting attributes and I think you know over the next two years if he takes incremental step with his command and his control
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that will ultimately sort of pay dividends in terms of how much better the slider plays.
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, how much better the sweeper that he throws plays, even how much better the change up plays.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we'll have this really well rounded arsenal.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, he's the kind of guy where the results don't scream five, 60 pitches, but I think when you look at the total picture, it really does.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he has maybe a higher
[SPEAKER_03]: range of outcomes.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a larger variance there than there are with maybe some of the other pitching prospects that are ranked in the top 100 and guys that are ranked ahead of him.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do think that he maybe has more of a chance to be like a frontline like a number two type of starter than a lot of guys who are ranked ahead of him.
[SPEAKER_03]: He just maybe has less of a chance of being a mid-rotation starter because of some of the things that still need to get cleaned up.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's still all this sort of untapped potential and ability there and I think it's one of the reasons that the raise of kind of slow rolled him this year beyond just the depth that they've had in Durham because he is the kind of prospect that regardless of major league depth you might have available.
[SPEAKER_03]: You'll make space for a guy like that if need be.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think it'll probably spend most of the year next year in Durham and we maybe don't see like a full major league season
[SPEAKER_03]: But if things kind of bait correctly over the next year plus, and he has a good off season, and it kind of hones in the mechanics and the consistent delivers operation, I think that he could take a major step forward and be one of the top 50 preaching prospects in the game next year.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a good one.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna go for one.
[SPEAKER_02]: I believe I haven't done this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know I've talked about him before at some point, but I don't think he's been a prospects of box, which is a guy that I've kind of,
[SPEAKER_02]: dove into a little bit more lately.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm trying to mix it up and make sure I don't always just do guys from organizations that I do.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm going to go into the Metz today, which is, if you check out the season that Jacob Brimer has had this year, it's really, the best way I can put it is is it's kind of impeccable,
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, it really is one where you just say, there's just not a lot not to like about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It he is, it's I think a bat first profile, largely, you know, again, like a lot of these guys that we're talking about who are really good hitters.
[SPEAKER_02]: But,
[SPEAKER_02]: He makes good swing decisions.
[SPEAKER_02]: We talked about this on the podcast recently.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's where it maybe came up a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he makes good swing decisions.
[SPEAKER_02]: He hits the ball hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't chase out of the zone.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he has the components to drive the ball and create impact when he does.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what you're looking for in a hitter.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just bring him up because I feel like he's been a really good year for the Metz.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been talking to people, and I would Josh put out his DSL list last week and reading people saying like, how we just don't really ever care about Metz prospects because and that's why I Elyian Pania ranked lower on that DSL list, which I promised you, that's not it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would say that like we're, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that we think that the meds are doing really good things in the minor leagues, but we also are going to reflect the reporting we're getting, which is when you talk to scouts who covered the DSL, they were not blown away with healing and pain yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Jacob Rimer is one of those guys in that organization that's had a lot of guys take step forward.
[SPEAKER_02]: Carson Benjovie's on the hitting side being a bigger example of this, but when Benj Lath Rimer kind of stepped in and it's really done a good job for them at the
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to piece coming up of like kind of looking at the trends of all the 30 organizations because for the far as the prospect side.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that the Met's kind of, I would say the Marlins are probably one that probably jumped out the most as far as having making the most rise, but like I do see signs at the minor league level that the Met's are kind of building
[SPEAKER_02]: that prospect, I want to say super power, but the ground floor is laid now for what you would expect for a David Stern's lead team where you would say, oh, they have a lot of money to spend at the big league level.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I'm top of that, they're really going to do a good job at player development.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, obviously, it's kind of easy to say that right now, Jeff, and when we talk
[SPEAKER_02]: that I feel like that they're having auditions to see is it going to be, if they make the playoffs, which we assume still they will, I feel comfortable we can say that they're gonna have at least one rookie in their rotation, come postseason, but it may be two.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you could be three, I mean, I don't know if the teams ever done that, like I ordered last time that's happened, but I would say that this point no one will clean is in their postseason rotation, I can't imagine he won't be in their rotation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jonah Tong might be in the rotation, and we'll see on Brandon's throat, he's got a couple more starts here to kind of show it, but I would say like that's an example, but then again, they're doing good things on the hitting side as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot, they're alike with what the mets are doing this year.
[SPEAKER_02]: Even if we clearly hate the mets, because we have William Payne and not ranked in the top 10 of the DSL top 35.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, but that's the way to wrap it up here at the Baseball America Prospect podcast as we do every week for Jeff.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm JJ so long, everybody.