Since I can’t go scout players in person as I usually would, I’ve been watching various young players so far this season to provide scouting-like notes from home, focusing on players who are either still rookies or just recently lost rookie eligibility but haven’t established themselves yet in the majors. This is the third in my series of scouting notebooks, covering some performances from the last four days of games, including another call-up from my preseason top 10.
Jo Adell was my No. 2 prospect coming into 2020, behind only Tampa Bay wunderkind Wander Franco, and before the shutdown he seemed likely to reach the majors after a few weeks had elapsed, pushing back his free agency by a year. The Angels ended up following a similar playbook, calling him up after 10 games — again, pushing off his free agency — and probably hoped he could add some juice to a team that had struggled to a 3-7 start. He can’t help their pitching, which has allowed 5.36 runs a game so far, and I’m concerned that he won’t give them much of a boost on the OBP side either.
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Adell’s debut was a quiet one, with an infield single for his first major-league hit and some trouble with big-league sliders. Three of his four at-bats ended on sliders down or down and away, and he made contact with two, although he chased both pitches when he should have let them go by. On the plus side, he seemed comfortable enough with real velocity, hitting a 97 mph fastball quite hard but right at the first baseman for a groundout. He showed grade-70 speed on his two groundballs, one of which became his first hit. His second night was a bit worse, with three strikeouts, swinging through three fastballs in the zone at 88-93 mph, with another infield single coming against 94 mph from a right-hander.
This is a tiny sample of eight at-bats and I’m not changing any conclusions or projections for Adell based on what I saw, but he did show a bit of what I’d seen before and what he demonstrated in a late-2019 stint in Triple A. He’s a tremendous athlete with plus-plus speed, and can make hard contact, with length to his swing and an approach that still needs tightening, especially on breaking stuff. I would have projected a lot of up-and-down for him in a regular 2020, with improvement over the course of the season. I would still say the same, although with 50 games left, we may not see the results of any adjustments until next year.
Oakland lefty Jesús Luzardo made his first career start on Tuesday night and showed electric stuff across five innings, sitting 94-98 mph in the first three innings and dropping all the way down to 93-98 mph after that. His changeup is already among the majors’ best, a circle-change at 88-90 mph that hitters couldn’t sniff, swinging and missing at five of the 14 changeups he threw. (Statcast has five fastballs coded as changeups, but all were 93-95 mph with spin rates akin to those on his fastballs.) His slider is solid-average, 83-86 mph with good spin, but hitters seem to pick it up better out of his hand, at least enough to know it’s not a fastball or changeup. It should be good enough to keep lefties in check, and he probably has to just improve his command a little and stay healthy to be a No. 2 or even No. 1 starter.
The Padres’ No. 2 prospect, right-hander Luis Patiño, made his major-league debut on Wednesday night in a relief stint against the Dodgers, showing premium stuff but struggling with location. Patiño was 95-99 mph across two innings, missing his location on several, although the two-strike fastball that Joc Pederson hit out for a three-run homer was right at the bottom of the zone. Patiño’s changeup showed plus when he got it down, coming in at 84-89 mph, with a pitch earlier in Pederson’s at-bat middle-away that was probably his best pitch of the night. His slider was 83-86 mph with a ton of downward break; his best one was the first one he threw, down and in to lefty Corey Seager for the one swing-and-miss Patiño got on the breaking ball all night. His line in the box score wasn’t great, after two groundball singles — one just barely beyond Manny Machado’s reach — and then Pederson’s towering homer, but he showed why he was my No. 12 prospect in baseball coming into the season, just one spot behind Nate Pearson and third among all right-handed pitchers.
Milwaukee right-hander Brandon Woodruff’s one weakness last year was left-handed hitters; he dominates right-handers with his 95-98 mph fastball and two very sharp breaking balls, but his changeup was clearly the worst of his offerings. He’d fine-tuned the pitch this offseason, and got swings-and-misses on 29 percent of the changeups he threw in his first two starts, but the White Sox had no trouble with it on Tuesday night, with zero whiffs out of 11 changeups. The pitch was 87-90 mph and very inconsistent in movement and arm speed, no better than above-average on the best ones.
Nick Madrigal’s first few games in the majors have shown exactly what we should have expected from him: A lot of weak contact and very few strikeouts. Madrigal is 5-for-17 for the White Sox as I write this, garnering four of those hits in one game against a weak array of Royals pitching, with all five hits going for singles. He’s struck out only twice for an 11.1 percent rate that would put him in the top 20 percent of all hitters if he qualified. This is pretty much what he is — a high-contact, no-power second baseman who’s a regular if he keeps his average high.
Daulton Varsho got his first start for Arizona on Tuesday night, going 0-for-4 but at least showing he could adjust to changing speeds in his four plate appearances. He played left field, with Carson Kelly entrenched behind the plate, and I’ll be watching to see if the Diamondbacks try Varsho at different positions, given his athleticism and surprising speed.
Nate Pearson and Touki Toussaint faced off on Thursday evening in one of the best young-pitching matchups of the week. Toussaint left the game with the Braves in the lead but the Blue Jays tied it up on the next batter. Pearson was 93-99 mph again, with a plus changeup at 85-89 mph, showing a much better feel for the pitch this time around. He should have thrown it to Freddie Freeman in the first inning, when Pearson was ahead 0-2, but instead he threw a mediocre slider down and in that stayed up enough for Freeman to golf it out for a two-run homer. Pearson was very strong through four innings, with an above-average curveball at 76-78 mph, before laboring in the fifth and losing a little velocity on his secondary stuff. Toussaint’s line through six innings was superb — two hits, no walks, nine strikeouts — before he ran into a little trouble in the seventh and was pulled after two outs. Toussaint was 93-95 mph with a very effective split-change anywhere from 83-88 mph and two breaking balls, a short slider at 83-87 mph and a two-plane curveball at 74-79 mph, giving up just a few hard-hit balls, including a homer to Bo Bichette on a curveball he left up. The best news on Toussaint’s outing is how much he was in the strike zone, throwing 71 percent of his pitches for strikes, although I’d give his control a full grade above his command. This is the guy his believers all thought he could be when he was a first-rounder in 2014, translating his athleticism into more consistency with his delivery and his stuff. One outing doesn’t make a pitcher, but this is the longest Toussaint’s ever pitched in the majors without walking a batter, and that seems like a positive indicator that he can keep his control up.
(Photo of Luzardo: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)
