St. Louis Cardinals Pitching Prospects – A look under the hood at some AAA guys

This is Part 2 of my exploration of some of the underlying details of Cardinal pitching prospects. The question I am trying to answer is… Of the minor leagues prospects we’ve been watching, who has the most interesting pitch shape metrics (ie. the under the hood stuff)? We seem to be far enough into the season to have built up some stats that can stand up to Small Sample Size (SSS) scrutiny. Since I do the daily down on the Farm Reports, I see the various pitcher usage and line score results every day. That has made me curious about some things that might be going on beyond the line score.

Last week folks got a look at the pitchers in Palm Beach. What I neglected to mention then is that the set of top 10th percentile pitch metrics was 225 pitch types deep, and the Cardinals had 25 entries in the group or just a little below league average of 28. This becomes a little less mundane when we start looking at AAA numbers.

First, I raised the bar for AAA pitchers to 150 pitches minimum instead of 50 pitches as for Low-A pitchers. This to keep the set manageable. If I used the same 50 pitch minimum, the AAA set would include 1267 pitcher/pitch type combinations. I’m looking for the outliers and that is a large outlier group. That the AAA group is five times bigger tells me that a significant difference between AAA and Low-A pitching is volume.

Same methodology as last week. I am looking for pitchers have top 10th percentile metrics. This is a “who has a tool that sticks out” kind of question. Even with a 150 pitch minimum, I still get 382 pitcher/pitch combinations in the top tenth percentile (almost double the Low-A group). In an ugly turn of events, only 17 Cardinal entries are found in this table and as you will see, too many of them are outlier in a bad way (as in last decile, not top).

AAA Metric Leader Board

Like last week, the first table shows just the pitch profile, not the results (which follow in the next section).

What do we see?

• People ask “what happened to Ian Bedell”. Well, he has an outlier bad FF velocity rate and gets no whiffs with it. And he uses this pitch 60.4% of the time. Pete Hansen and Bruce Zimmerman are in the same bottom decile in FB velocity across the International League, with the same whiff results. At least they don’t use this pitch nearly as often.

• Gastelum is in the top decile for spin rate on his Four Seam Fastball (FF), resulting in a top 20th percentile arm-side run. I bet that pitch really bores in on RH hitters.

• Skylar Hales has about the straightest FF in the league.

• Brycen Mautz is top floor on his arm-side run on his fastball, which probably allows the fairly pedestrian velo to play up. I bet he’d be super effective coming in to face LH hitters in relief, if that sorta thing was needed in StL.

• Mautz’ slider is odd. Almost no movement. This is one of those counter-intuitive ones. You’d rather be in the lowest tenth percentile, since glove side run is shown as a negative number in the data set.

• Rajcic’s horizontal movement on his fastball is near-elite, and you will see later gets elite results.

• Roycroft’s sinker profiles as elite, both in velo and drop (IVB). If only he had poise.

• Zimmermann makes the list in a bad way on his FF, FS and SL. He limits damage by limiting walks.

Overall, this is not a good profile for the AAA group and we see this with the shortage of depth for the MLB staff. We will keep this handy and see how it changes as some of the AA studs matriculate to Memphis later this year.

Performance Matters

Stuff (and the underlying metrics which show it) are one thing. Performance is another. Which AAA pitchers are getting the most out of their stuff? Let’s look more at performance outcomes as see how they rate.

In the above table, you will see many of the same names and pitches, this time with how those pitches are performing in real games. There are few new names, as some guys without top 10th percentile stuff are still getting top tenth percentile results, such as Nelfy Ynfante, who really limits hard contact without any top tier stuff.

Some notes:

• Gastelum (CH), Mautz (SL) and Roycroft (SI) each have a go-to pitch that is effective at limiting damage.

• Zimmermann avoids damage by limiting walks across all his pitches.

• Skylar Hales has an elite K rate. I’m not sure how.

You know what else I notice in these lists? Quinn Mathews doesn’t appear once. I wonder why? Let’s look specifically at his Prospect Savant page.

You see that his whiff rate falls just below elite at 89th percentile. Lots of stuff between average (~50th) and really good (80th), but nothing elite. Gives me a picture he does many things well, but nothing great. Even his walk rate isn’t anywhere near bottom 10th percentile for AAA.

The other thing I see in his data: His FF is probably his worst pitch in terms of K and BB rates. He throws it almost 50% of the time. He actually has a higher walk rate (25%) on his FF than K rate (23%). An adjustment to his pitch mix is coming.

Summary

There really isn’t anyone at AAA with standout tools. That is not to say there aren’t good pitchers. My screen was for top 10th percentile stuff…elite. Apparently, that is to be found at AA and High-A. We shall see.

Links

Here is a link to the underlying spreadsheet with top decile performance across the AAA level of baseball.