Daily Prospect Notes: 5/4

Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Mike Gerber, OF, Detroit (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: 5   Top 100: NR
Line: 4-for-5, 2 2B, 3 R, BB, SB

Notes
A 15th-round pick in 2014 out of an underrated Creighton program, Gerber first garnered national media attention by performing well during the 2015 Fall League. He finished 2016 with 42 games at Double-A Erie and has started well there this season, hitting .300/.364/.450. Gerber has some swing-and-miss and platoon issues (he has a 26% career strikeout rate and so far this year his splits are 34% against lefties, 21% against righties) but has solid-average raw power. He also plays good defense in right field, so even if he never hits lefties, he could still play every day because of the glove. He projects as a low-end regular.

Tyler Mahle, RHP, Cincinnati (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 16   Top 100: NR
Line: 5 IP, 7 H, 2 BB, 3 ER, 7 K

Notes
Mahle is creating quite a buzz with his early-season performance at Double-A. He has been remarkably efficient, most notably completing a perfect game on April 22nd in just 88 pitches. His fastball has mostly been sitting 92-94 this year and a scout who saw him has a future 60 on Mahle’s fastball command, noting that he has a surprising ability to repeat a somewhat noisy delivery and command his fastball to both sides of the plate. Mahle’s secondaries are fringe to average but play up because of how well he locates them. The rate at which he’s missing bats may not hold in the majors because Mahle doesn’t have big stuff, but the needle is certainly pointing up past what looked like a back-end starter’s profile after last offseason.

Dakota Hudson, RHP, St. Louis (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 7   Top 100: HM
Line: 5.2 IP, 8H, 3 R (2 ER), 0 BB, 7 K

Notes
Hudson fell to the back of the 2016 first round due to delivery/injury concerns, but he has a deep repertoire of big-league quality offerings and a chance to be a good mid-rotation arm if he can stay healthy. Be not discouraged by his pedestrian 4.13 ERA. Hudson is the only 2016 draftee other than White Sox reliever Zack Burdi to have reached Double-A, and his numbers need to be viewed with this in mind.

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Notes from the back fields

Rockies extended spring training is especially important for those seeking to cover the org’s younger players in a time-efficient manner, as the club doesn’t have an AZL team, either sending their prospects back to the Dominican or onward to the club’s Pioneer League affiliate in Grand Junction, Utah. Yesterday, 20-year-old lefty Breiling Eusebio flashed a plus fastball, sitting in the 90-93 range but touching 94 with movement on occasion. I have a 40 on the upper-70s curveball right now.

There are several other notable early-round pitching draftees on Colorado’s extended-spring roster, and not all of them are healthy. The club’s second rounder from 2016, Ben Bowden, a giant 240-pound lefty from Vanderbilt, was 90-92 with downhill plane with an above-average changeup and fringey, low-80s curveball yesterday. He was 88-90 for scouts in an appearance on Monday. I saw him up to 97 last October.

Colorado’s 2015 third rounder, RHP Javier Medina, has had Tommy John. RHP Robert Tyler is down here, as well, and threw in a game on April 10th, but scouts sitting on the Rockies of late have not seen him throw.

In the evening I was in Tempe for more Arizona state high-school playoffs. Pinnacle High School shortstop Jake Holmes, an Arizona State commit, homered in the first inning, showed an above-average arm after fielding a grounder to his left, and ran 4.20 home to first on my stopwatch on a ground out. An area scout noted that Holmes began to garner more attention from scouts as he’s grown into his frame over the last few months, and it sounds like he’s going to be one of the earlier high-school prospects drafted from the Phoenix area.

Basha High School shortstop Gage Workman, a long-limbed and very projectable 6-foot-3, is also of interest to scouts. He, too, is committed to Arizona State. Workman was originally slated to graduate in 2018 but reclassified as a 2017 draft in the fall. He’s unpolished (and projects to third base) but has big raw power projection and has already shown quite a bit. (He hit a ball out of Tempe Diablo Stadium yesterday that he didn’t really square up.) Workman is Mormon and reclassified, not just so he’d be young for his class in the upcoming draft, but because, if he doesn’t sign, he’s going to do two years of missionary work after his freshman year at ASU.





Eric Longenhagen is from Catasauqua, PA and currently lives in Tempe, AZ. He spent four years working for the Phillies Triple-A affiliate, two with Baseball Info Solutions and two contributing to prospect coverage at ESPN.com. Previous work can also be found at Sports On Earth, CrashburnAlley and Prospect Insider.

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DBall
6 years ago

Love the Daily Prospect Notes! Keep up the fantastic work Eric. Have you seen anything from Sean Reid-Foley? Seemed to make great strides with command last year by having a more repeatable delivery, but so far this year his command has disappeared.