By Numbers, Pittsburgh’s Taillon Is Top-Five Pitching Prospect
Happy Jameson Taillon Day to you and yours!
The right-handed prospect is set to debut for the Pirates tonight in their game against the Mets. This has been a long time coming for Taillon, who was selected second overall way back in 2010. He sat out the entirety of the 2014 and 2015 seasons following Tommy John and then hernia surgery, but has pitched better than ever in Triple-A this year.
In 10 Triple-A starts this season, he’s recorded a dazzling 1.93 FIP, striking out 26% of opposing hitters and walking a mere 3%. Running those numbers through the KATOH machine, I get a projection of 7.9 WAR for Taillon over the next six seasons, which would have placed him fifth among pitchers on KATOH’s preseason list. Given his recent performance, there’s little reason to think Taillon won’t succeed in the show. In order to account for Taillon’s missed development time, it might make sense to knock a year off of his age when calculating his projection. Running him as a 23-year-old rather than a 24-year-old yields a forecast of 10.7 WAR.
To put some faces to Taillon’s statistical profile, let’s go ahead and generate some statistical comps for the former second-overall pick. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis Distance between Taillon’s 2016 Triple-A numbers and every Triple-A season since 1991 in which a pitcher faced at least 350 batters. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues.
| Rank | Name | Proj. WAR | Actual WAR |
| 1 | Scott Elarton | 10.8 | 4.9 |
| 2 | Ryan Madson | 8.4 | 5.9 |
| 3 | Sean Douglass | 8.7 | 0.4 |
| 4 | Brett Myers | 10.4 | 13.6 |
| 5 | Aaron Sele | 7.7 | 11.6 |
| 6 | Brandon McCarthy | 13.3 | 8.4 |
| 7 | Jeff Juden | 9.8 | 2.5 |
| 8 | Kevin Slowey | 8.9 | 6.7 |
| 9 | Dan Haren | 8.7 | 24.1 |
| 10 | Jason Schmidt | 8.3 | 12.9 |
Six years and one day after they took him near the top of the first round, the Pirates can finally begin reaping the rewards from their #2 overall pick. Things looked a bit hairy for a couple of years there, but Taillon seems to have recovered nicely from his injury, and is finally ready to help the Pirates win some ball games. Seeing how Pittsburgh is in the thick of the NL Wild Card race and has some struggling players at the back of their rotation, Taillon could make a substantial impact down the stretch. We’ll get our first glimpse of that impact tonight.
Chris works in economic development by day, but spends most of his nights thinking about baseball. He writes for Pinstripe Pundits, FanGraphs and The Hardball Times. He's also on the twitter machine: @_chris_mitchell None of the views expressed in his articles reflect those of his daytime employer.
Here’s to an auspicious start to your career, Jameson!