High School Pitching Prospects In Every Shape and Size

Baseball players can be pretty big. I knew this going in. Even so, I was not prepared for Noah Yoder. The 18-year-old pitcher from Mechanicsville, Virginia, draped himself onto the chair I’d set out for him, and then he started to overflow his container, like an overproofed bread dough liberating itself from a too-small pan.

Yoder explained that, having little showcase experience other than an eye-catching performance at East Coast Pro, he was enjoying his fancy surroundings at the MLB Draft Combine. Having a shuttle bus from the hotel to the ballpark was a particularly nice surprise.

As he settled into his seat and stretched out his legs, I was quickly coming to the realization that I had not left nearly enough space between his chair and my own. My previous interview had been with a compact college relief pitcher, and I hadn’t thought to rearrange the furniture for my next guest.

Between icebreaker questions, I discreetly scooted my chair back several inches to alleviate the sensation that Yoder and I were sitting in each other’s laps. I’m the kind of person who relives slightly awkward interactions like this decades into the future.

I didn’t get that sense about Yoder, who looks at least as big as his listed 6-foot-6, 230 pounds. On the mound, he appears to be even taller because he pitches with a bandanna on his head, his cap smushed on top of it like a Civil War forage cap.

Everything about him is a little loosey-goosey; he’s thoughtful and direct, but he also smiles and laughs easily. It’s more of the same on the mound. The scouting book on him is that he’s the typical high school lump of clay: Big, projectable body with massive velocity, touching the upper 90s with his heater. Plus a hard sinker and a developing changeup.

“Like everybody else now, I throw a kick change,” he said. “You spike the middle finger, and then you kind of do a circle change grip with your pointer and your thumb. It’s a new pitch. I worked on it from a year ago until now, and it’s been fun. I love throwing it. For some reason, the kick change is just an interesting pitch, and it moves differently every time I throw it.”

His best secondary offering is his breaking ball, a truly sobering low-80s knuckle-curve.

“With the spike curve, I spike my pointer finger. I mean, I just put a ton of pressure on my middle finger. And that’s my secondary that I’ve thrown the longest, and it’s been great for me in 0-0 counts. Especially, development-wise as I’ve gotten better, just to throw it when you’re down in the count, or even in the count, and it plays differently when you’re able to mix it in whenever, because players never know what you’re going to pitch.”

But the command is barely there, and he struggles to hold his velocity through starts, even in a seven-inning high school game.

Yoder said he’s working on his fitness: Band work, burpees, broad jumps, and other exercises to increase explosiveness and endurance. Along with the dreaded running.

“Yeah, it’s cardio,” Yoder said when I asked him what was his least favorite part of training. “I’m a baseball player, and I think a lot of baseball players would agree with the cardio aspect. I played basketball during the winter and, oh, man. Just practicing every day was… yeah. I enjoyed basketball but I hated running. I’m cool to put the ball in the basket, but running up and down the court is kind of crazy.”

Admirable candor and self-awareness from a kid who just turned 18, and delightfully self-deprecating. Yoder seemed down for whatever, in the sense that many newly minted high school graduates are down for whatever, even though he was in the midst of the biggest week and change of his life to that point.

Let’s start on June 10. Yoder had committed to play college baseball at Duke for coach Chris Pollard; on the morning of the 10th, Pollard called Yoder to tell him he was leaving Duke for the University of Virginia. Yoder would have to decide whether to stick with Duke and its then-unknown new coach or reopen his recruitment a month before the draft.

But not, like, right that second, because Yoder had to start a playoff game that evening.

“I really appreciate [Pollard] telling us ahead of the news coming out,” Yoder said. “But that Tuesday, we had the game against Hampton, the state quarterfinal, and it was weird having to adjust. I’d just found out this, like, future-threatening news, but yeah, focus on the game.”

Yoder did fine. He threw four scoreless innings and picked up the win as his Atlee Raiders, the defending state champions, advanced to the semis with a 7-0 win.

On June 13, Yoder watched from the dugout as his teammates got blanked by Heritage High School and got knocked out of the playoffs. After two days off, Yoder was on a plane to Arizona, where he talked to me on the afternoon of June 17, dressed in his combine-issued t-shirt and shorts as he prepared to throw an inning in that evening’s high school showcase game.

“I think the nerves aren’t there as much as I have been asked [about],” Yoder said. “I know scouts have seen me, and if anything, I’m telling myself that today’s game can only help. If you bomb it, like, it’s whatever. But I’m trying to keep that out of my mind. I’m a nervous person by nature, so it’s kind of weird that I don’t feel as crazy, or as psyched out, but I’m just excited to play.”

The showcase game is even less of a traditional game than the Futures Game or All-Star Game, but it’s a rare opportunity for high schoolers — especially for those like Yoder, who aren’t from Georgia or Florida or Southern California and didn’t play much on the showcase circuit — to face off against top-level competition.

Yoder wasn’t perfect in his inning of work in the high school game, but he didn’t bomb it either. He hit a batter and gave up a run, but he struck out two hitters as well. He also threw the hardest pitch of the entire game, a 96.8-mph four-seamer. Rolling in the pitchers who didn’t participate in the game but threw bullpen sessions, only two high school pitchers threw harder all week.

With combine workouts and interviews done, Yoder then made an announcement of his own on June 19: He was decommitting from Duke and following Pollard to UVA. When we spoke, he said he was still figuring things out, saying only that he wanted to get his college commitment figured out before the draft.

“Leverage-wise, obviously, it’s helpful,” he said. “But another thing is, I would like to know where I’m going to go before I make the decision of whether I want to go to pro ball out of high school or not. That’s really crucial.”

Unlike some players expected to go on Day One, Yoder only had four interviews with teams during his time in Arizona, though he said he’d met with representatives from numerous other organizations back in Virginia.

“You have to talk to a lot of those regional scouts now, and they fiercely scribble notes as you talk to them, and write stuff down for the upper-level guys,” Yoder quipped.

But what were the interviews like? How can a high schooler succeed at that part of the audition?

“A lot of questions center around your opportunity for growth and coachability,” Yoder said. “‘Give me an example about a time when this happened, and how did you respond to it?’ That’s a big template for the questions that people ask. It makes sense, because you want to know how people respond to things in the moment, and that’s super important for a team to know. Are we getting a guy that we trust to battle back when they don’t do well — especially when they’re used to being so good in high school that they haven’t had much failure before?”

As I was thinking about that point — what makes a good interview — I noticed a presence looming outside the door. It was Cooper Underwood, a prep lefty from outside of Atlanta who was committed to Georgia Tech. Underwood shares a general profile with Yoder: high school pitcher with plenty of potential but nowhere near big league ready. But the two could hardly be more different.

For starters, Underwood was 15 minutes early for his interview. I’ve never had a player show up for an interview at the combine 15 minutes early; maybe for a team, you want to err on the side of caution, but players with time to kill go for a walk, go to the bathroom, find a chair in the hall and look at their phone to kill time. Underwood kept peeking nervously at the open door, like he was worried about missing a court appearance.

I let Yoder go and had Underwood take the open seat. At 6-foot-2, 185 pounds, Underwood did not expand to fill all the available space in the room. He sat upright, with perfect posture, and maintained eye contact. We spoke for 21 minutes, and during the course of our conversation he said “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” a total of 29 times.

The occasional “Yes, sir,” isn’t unusual for a young man from a certain environment speaking to an unfamiliar adult. (One of the more jarring experiences of my journalistic career was getting the “Yes, sir” treatment from Paul Skenes during his college career. Skenes was not then the mustachioed destroyer of planets that he has since become, but even then he was twice my size.) But Underwood uses it as a verbal pause, the way I say, “you know.”

He also loves cardio.

“I think the biggest thing pitchers underrate is how much running helps you,” Underwood said. “Running is huge. Doing sprints and long runs help you keep up your endurance and your athleticism.”

The contrast to Yoder continues on the mound.

Underwood has a compact left-handed delivery with not one but two complementary breaking pitches: a slow curve and a slider.

“I have my curveball, which is 12-to-6. I could throw that in any count; I’m very comfortable with that pitch,” Underwood said. “Slider, too. I think I probably threw more 3-2 sliders than fastballs. I’m very comfortable with my two breaking pitches. My changeup is a work in progress right now, but I’m working at that every day. Gonna throw it today in the game and see what I can do with it.”

Those pitches — along with a good feel for the strike zone — came before a late-teens velo spike that has him sitting in the 92-93 range now.

“I try to split the plate into two pieces,” Underwood said. “I think first-pitch strikes are the biggest thing ever, winning that first pitch. No one cares how hard you throw the ball. What matters is getting outs. Not even striking guys out, but getting 21 outs in the high school game, that’s the biggest thing. Going seven innings to save your bullpen. Keep your pitch count low and maintain your velocity all the way through.”

This is one of my favorite pitcher development paths: Guys who learn how to pitch first, then learn how to throw hard — Corbin Burnes, Shane Bieber, Cristopher Sánchez. Training methods are so good now, and velo spikes, like Underwood’s, are happening so early that it’s hard to find guys like these before they reach pro ball. But there might be more meat left on this bone with Underwood, even though he grew up in a massive amateur baseball hotbed.

“I’m not a techie at all,” he said. “I’ve only been around Rapsodo; that’s the only kind of pitching metrics I’ve been exposed to. So a lot of it is feel, a lot of watching videos. I like to watch big leaguers and compare myself to those guys, to see what I need to work on to get to that level. Those guys up there are the best. I watch Max Fried, he’s one of the best in the game right now. I understand I’m not Max Fried, so I have to do it my way, but if I work on what he’s working on, maybe I can figure out some way [to make what he’s doing work for me.]”

Under the eye of the fancy cameras, Underwood got up to 93 with one fastball, spun a couple sliders at or around 3,000 rpm, and dropped a 2,900 rpm curveball with 16 inches of induced vertical break.

Underwood spoke to nine teams at the combine, and said it was a little weird talking about himself all day.

“I normally don’t ever try to hype myself up,” he said. “I’m more laid-back, trying to help other people. And talking about myself makes me feel like I’m trying to be a little cocky, in a sense. I don’t try to come off that way.”

I know a lot of teams wouldn’t mind it if he did. Great baseball players come in all shapes and sizes, and even a bucket as specific as “projectable high school pitching prospect” can encompass two of the more physically, technically, and temperamentally different pitchers I’ve ever met. There’s more than one way to succeed in baseball, but you do have to do your cardio, even if you hate it.